The Mark Of Athena MC Edit
by Messers Cohen
Summary: The Mark of Athena, as written by myself. Please do read, enjoy, and review.
1. Chapter 1

**The Mark Of Athena - Messers Cohen's Edit**

This is the Mark of Athena, as written by myself. It's a very different style, and does contain adult elements... profanity, sex, gore; more like sexual interaction, but not of a detailed nature, and the violence isn't overly gory, not really at all- still,probably not a good idea to read this out in school assembly.

This chapter starts right after the first chapter, as written and read by Riordan himself. If you haven't had a taste of what is to come in the actual book, just search 'rick riordan reads form the mark of athena' in youtube. Please review, and constructive criticism is always helpful. This contains a Percabeth reunion, and no, there isn't any sex in this chapter- there is swearing as well, but also no gore or violence- this one's really how i see it- I know a lot of people state she's more likely to deck Percy and then kiss him, and this is her usual character- but the point is, she isn't in a normal state of mind- she's been missing Percy for eight months. She's not going to be thinking about punching him!

Naturally, i don't actually own the series.

Review constructively plzkthnxbai :)

1.

Annabeth

The marble statue of the weakened Terminus, shown by its flickering status, displayed a grumpy expression.

"Beware Greeks bearing gifts, demigods. We don't use that expression for just anything, you know. It's become one of our mottos through experiences that have proven it to be true!" He exclaimed, his image vibrating.

"We know that this is difficult for you," Annabeth said, putting her hands out in a placating gesture. "But you're going to have to trust us. You've met Percy- he's earned your trust. All we're asking is that you give us the same chance you usually give newcomers...you do give them a chance, right?"

"If first impressions aren't good enough, we usually slaughter them. But put that to one side." Terminus said, Leo paling when he spoke.

The god considered for a moment, face pondering the alternative.

"Very well," he finally decided. "You may enter Camp Jupiter-"

"Camp Jupiter? Yeah, totally fucking rip off us, sure, Romans, you do that-"

"Leo!" hissed Piper. "Not-the-right-time!"

"...but this metal monstrosity remains in the air, above us, as do your weapons, Greeks, you understand? I will not have you threaten my city!" The statue on the deck of the Argo II exploded as he shouted, little bits of Terminus' skull raining down through the deck.

"Very well, Terminus. We agree to your terms." Said Annabeth.

She relaxed. It wasn't easy, bargaining with an OCD border god, and then add that to the chills she'd felt, the worry she'd borne, the stress she'd undergone without Percy in her life- it was difficult, leave it at that. Her heart leapt as she neared to seeing Percy again, the swept black hair, the green eyes, his face in all its beauty. And yet she contained herself, for she pondered the possiblities; Percy could have changed, become more Roman than Greek, distancing himself from her, he could have found new friends, or maybe even-she trembled at the thought- he'd found another girlfriend. He wouldn't. Though the strength of her passion and devotion had seen her, easily, through the months without him, her doubts were brought to bear as she neared him.

The armless, headless, half-destroyed marble bust of Terminus vanished from the deck.

Jason's voice distracted her from her worries. "They're coming from a senate meeting...they're speaking to Terminus, who's just appeared in front of them."

Annabeth leaned over the side, looking for the very scene he was describing. Sure enough, a gray statue, armless and legless had appeared in front of a flock of people, who were draining out of a huge building, intricately decorated, roof cracked, speaking to them. As he finished, a huge groan of protest came from the crowd, but was drowned at once, presumably by something Terminus said.

"Ah...thank god. They're all handing over their weapons to Terminus. He's collecting everything people have got. Everything." He smiled slightly.

"Well, that's a relief." Piper said, who had stood alongside Jason, a hand on his shoulder.

"yeah, no shit. Can we go down now? Actually, heck, why am I asking. The supreme commander does what he wants." laughed Leo, pleased with the realisation of his own power.

Percy

Percy watched from the front of the Romans, shoulder to shoulder with Reyna, as four figures descended from the side of the Celestial bronze-plated warship. He tried to remember how to breathe, but it was diffuclt, and rapidly became more so as the hair colour of one of those descending became clear. Blonde. Percy had eyes for none other than her as the reached the ground, one after the other, and the other.

The only face he had recognised became clearer as she approached. The one face who he had held clear since his appearance at the Wolf House, the one person who he knew he would never leave, who he could not.

He pulled away for a moment. _Think as a praetor for a moment, Percy_, he chided himself. One was a dark-skinned girl, her hair braided down one side with a raven feather, kaleidescopic eyes a distracting feature, slim, pretty...another was a curly-haired, impish-looking boy with a wild look in his eyes. Hazel's lost friend, Sammy Valdez reborn, or so she said. And then a boy, blond hair, blue eyes, purple toga, tall, handsome. Jason, he realised. And finally...her. His memories of her paled into insignifance at the sight of her, her stunning, slim face, her beautiful features, her long blonde hair, her storm-grey eyes, hunted a thousand miles. The eyes that were looking down. Not at Percy, but below him, somewhere to his right. _What have I done_? He thought. _She's forgotten me. I'm just a piece of her past, i'm not_- His thought ceased to move, frozen as she looked up and caught his eye.

Annabeth

_Di immortales_, she said in her head. Look at him. The _eyes, the hair, the face, the figure, the posture, it was him! _She rejoiced inwardly, but her internal struggle wasn't done just yet_. Don't look, _she said to herself. _You don't know how he's feeling yet. Look away_! She screamed inwardly. She neared, and she could not help herself but stare in wonder at the architecture. Such a fascinating development, that this roman engineering was still present. She made a mental note to study it at some point, and then her eyes snapped back to Percy's feet.

She looked up, and as the swirling clouds of the storm met the green foam of the sea, all was she had hoped for. They were still together; he wanted her just as much as she still did him! It was too much- she began to smile, to grin, her hapiness cracking her mouth- and so did he. That tentative smile made it all the more worth it. As the solemn procession of Annabeth, Leo, Piper, and Jason reached a distance of ten feet from the Roman crowd, Percy and another purple-cloaked camper beside him a few feet in front of them, the first words between Greek and Roman, officially, was spoken:

"How y'all doin'? I'm Leo Valdez-" There was a squeal, and a girl with chocolatey curls fell to the ground, out cold.

"Well, if this is how all you Romans are, how the hell did you manage to last this long? Anyway, i'm-" he cleared his throat-" the supreme commander of the Argo II, that magnificent flying craft up there."

The Romans were open-mouthed, stunned. Then the girl, glossy-haired, who stood next to Percy, purple-cloaked, spoke: "Greeks-"

"Yes, Greeks!" a thin voice cried, angrily. A straw-like kid pushed through to the front of the crowd. "Greeks, who we have shunned as our enemies for centuries, for good reason! Praetor, listen to reason! Take these infidels elsewhere- don't let them-" he leaned closer to the other praetor-" whisper their lies in your ear." He hissed venomously.

"Octavian... stand down. I have made my decision. You have had your chance to speak when the senate met."

"I think you forget, Octavian," said Percy, clearly, "That i'm Greek, too."

Octavian, whoever he was, seemed to realised his error. "I...apologise-"

"Return to the temple." snapped the other praetor.

Octavian scurried away, with... wait. A teddy bear in his hands? Little creepy, Annabeth decided.

Piper stepped forward, and spoke. She spoke of peace, and regret for past deceptions, past wars, a new beginning, friendship, the strength of unity and bonds forged anew. The suggestion of her words was so strong, so compulsory, Annabeth felt the touch of a warm feeling towards everybody, every person in the crowd. They were all going to be her new best friends- wow. Stop there.

The other praetor blinked uncertainly, and then Percy spoke up: "Yes, i think it'd be an excellent idea if we returned to your quarters, Reyna."

Annabeth looked at him, and saw he hadn't been fazed by the charmspeak. But his gaze lingered a moment longer on Piper, newfound respect in his eyes.

For a moment, her mind turned towards jealousy. His eyes should be on me, she thought. But then she pushed that aside, realising how petty that sounded.

As the group turned in the opposite direction, joined by Reyna, Percy, and two others who Annabeth did not recognize- the dark-skinned girl who had fainted, and a bulky, chinese, cherub-faced boy carrying her in his arms.

"Who the heck are you?" said Leo to the chinese kid.

"They're with me. Don't worry. You can trust them." Percy said to no-one in particular.

While Percy was in her view, she was oblivious to the places she was going, oblivious to direction, ignorant of the chills that didn't happen- it was as if he banished her fears just by...being there.

Finally, they arrived at a large, impressively structed house, reminding Annabeth, distracted though she was, of a villa. The house stood next to another identical building, and for a moment Jason took a hesitant step towards it, like reaching towards a long-lost friend. But then he restrained himself and headed inside the first building, the one with the lights on inside, after Reyna. Percy... Annabeth's heart skipped a beat. He was waiting, standing to the side of the door, eyes flickering towards her, smiling slowly. And as Piper went in lastly, smiling at Piper over her shoulder as she went in and shut the door behind her, Percy rushed to her.

For a moment, they embraced each other. Then Annabeth faced him, and pressed her lips to his. It started gently, and then their lips were crushed against one another in a moment of passion. Slowly, they stopped. She raked her fingers through his black hair, looked into his sea-green eyes, and he brushed her hair back, watched her.

"Annabeth." He said, his voice breaking. "You were the...the only thing i could-remember-"He voice stopped, unable to continue for a moment. "You miss me?" he asked quietly, crookedly smiling.

"More than anything else...Percy, i never stopped looking, I never gave up hope, and now you're here! Here! Oh, thank the gods, Percy, you're here."

"Annabeth," he murmmured into her ear, like an incantation. Their fondling, rekindling of memories and intensity turned to another kiss, that lasted half a minute. "I love you," she whispered into his ear.

"I love you too," he whispered back, and she thought her heart would melt. Now she had Percy again.


	2. Chapter 2

**2. I get what people are saying- a lot of the time this doesn't sound like the characters- but just think about it- how often do the rest of us swear? How often would you have time for cracking jokes when you're, seriously, facing down flesh-eating monsters every other minute- you become, at times, harder, and you have to be completely sure that you actually can before you genuinely relax, let your hair down. Besides that, there's more joking around now- for the first chapter, Annabeth is terrified out of her mind because she wants to see Percy, but she's nervous about how he feels, and Leo's wanting to keep his ship pristine, worrying about the Romans, Piper's thinking about this 'Reyna', and Jason's wandering if the Romans remember him, and just how friendly they're going to be. I think you'd be on edge. On the other hand, i understand your views- this isn't really the same, amazing characters we all know and utterly adore, but it's something different- a new perspective. **

**Anyway, enough nattering- got a tour of the Argo II here, some laughs (i think), about time, and a leader coming to bear. Enjoy!**

**Review plzkthnxbai :)**

Jason

They'd only spent moments inside, before he greeted Reyna again. "Reyna-"

"Jason! It's been-too long." she said, and once the...almost lack of recognition, as if she was stunned he was here, faded from her face, gave him a hug.

His face turned a little red, and he saw Piper across the room. She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. He understood. _For now, Jason._

He thanked her silently. _I'm yours, anyway, Piper._

"You've changed, Jason. Taller, tanned, a little more Greek, even." She said, a smile tugging at the corner of one mouth.

The door opened, just as he opened his mouth to return the surprisingly playful banter, and Reyna's expression changed, hardened slightly.

_So, _he though. _Softer, slightly. She trusts...him. But she still needs to be a leader._

The two arrivals came in, Annabeth in front of her boyfriend, and smile stretching her lips. Jason could just see from her expression that she was euphoric.

And then she moved further into the room, and Jason got his first look proper at the living Greek legend of Percy Jackson.

He was tall, taller than him, perhaps the tallest in here, but by no means more ripped than Jason. He was light on his feet, a lethal grace that was barely obvious, but nonetheless present, still muscular. Deep black hair and vivid green eyes were his standout features, and a...slim but fairly bold profile marked him out as the one he had seen in Chiron's photo at Camp Half-blood.

He wondered about the tales of heroics Percy had to his name. He must be an incredible warrior, and even then to say nothing of his powers. Jason himself had defeated, crushed the Titan Krios with his bare hands, but Percy...he'd taken on and defeated, single-handedly, the King of the Titans, the Lord of Time itself, Kronos. Still, using my hands evens up the score...okay, it doesn't really, he thought.

"Sorry to keep everyone waiting, guys..." Percy said nervously, embarassed.

"It's fine." Jason was surprised to find the words coming from his own mouth. "No problem." He held out his hand to Percy. "Percy Jackson, right?" he asked.

"Yeah," he said, taking his hand curiously at first, then with a measure of gratefulness. "Jason."

Jason realised there was a silence in the room that was only to be matched by the introduction of two rival gods as everyone watched the two demigods.

"Well," said Reyna unsettled, thought she tried to hide it. "Shall we...begin? There are chairs in the corner there. Let's just get everyone sat down first."

Six demigods reached for chairs, Jason too- he had noticed the purple toga Percy wore, and could only wonder that he had been raised so soon. He was a Roman. He did what was best for Rome, and so did the others here. All of them. If they had seen it fit to raise him on a shield, if they had deemed him worthy of the praetorship, then so did he.

Percy and Reyna sat in chairs already laid out, sitting in the beginnings of a circle, Percy on Reyna's left. Annabeth came to sit on Percy's left, smiling at him, eyes twinkling, and then Piper, then Leo, then Jason, Hazel, who gave Jason a small squeeze on the arm, and then the chinese guy, ending on Reyna's right.

"Very well. Greeks." Reyna hesitated again, coughing, and Percy saved her from an embarassing silence. "Well- how about we get to know each other. It's not like we're all exactly acquainted, so let's start, seeing as the seven are in this room as well."

There was a slight pause at the mention of the Great Prophecy, and then Reyna began.

"I am Reyna, Praetor of the Twelfth Legion, daughter of Bellona, goddess of war. I have served at camp jupiter for four years."

"I'm Percy Jackson, Praetor of the Twelfth Legion, Hero of Olympus, Son of Poseidon, or Neptune, i guess. I've been at camp Jupiter for just a little under a week, but i was at camp half-blood for 5 years before this."

"I'm Annabeth Chase, Architect of Olympus, Daughter of Athena, goddess of wisdom, arts and crafts, and war."

"I'm Piper...McLean..." Jason waited for someone to recognise the family name, pick up the actor her father was, but no-one did. Thankfully. " Daughter of Aphrodite. I can charmspeak."

The question of what that was was left unasked by the Romans, but by Percy's expression, Jason saw he had already guessed her power.

"I'm Leo Valdez- you aren't going to faint again, are you?" - Hazel looked like she would when he spoke to her- "supreme commander of the Argo II, Son of Hephaestus. I can, and this is cool, use fire in a special way..." he higlighted the 'special' with a snap of his fingers, creating a blaze in the middle of his palm. The chinese guy tried to back up real quick, forgetting he was on a chair, topling over backwards, and Hazel leaned away, her hysteria overcome by fear, clutching at a lump in her lower torso underneath her jacket.

"I'm Jason Grace, Fifth Cohort. I've served thirteen years in the Legion, since i was three. I am the Son of Jupiter. I can, and this is...unusual, apprently, fly."

"You couldn't fly when you were here previously, Jason. How come?" asked Hazel.

"I don't know. waking up, not knowing who i was, discovering all my powers in minutes, seconds, i wasn't really thinking about the how part, more the _what the heck am i doing here _part. I guess i just didn't know. I don't think i ever tried it, either." He replied.

"I'm Hazel Levesque. I am a daughter of Pluto, i've served less than a year at camp Jupiter. I can control precious metals-"

"Wait...you said you're a daughter of Pluto. That's Hades, right?" said Leo, confused. "He's the god of the underworld. Well, what the hell has that got to do with jewllery?"

Piper saved Hazel from replying: "Sherlock, the roman form of Hades, Pluto, has control of riches as well as death. So, if you're born a child of Pluto, you can either have control of percious items, like Hazel, i'm assuming, or-"

"Or death," Hazel said. "Like my brother, Nico."

"Nico! He's here?" said Annabeth incredulously.

"Annabeth, he's been taken...by Gaea," said Percy. "He was looking for the Doors of Death, but she got hold of him and has him prisoner."

"Oh no...how long has he been gone?"

"Since we came back from the quest a day ago."

"Wait," said Annabeth, confused for once. "You mean he was here at the camp beforehand? He knew about this place? How did he find it? Why didn't he tell us-" she demanded.

"Believe me, i'd be asking if the kid was here," Percy grumbled.

Hazel's eyes lowered to the floor at the mention of her brother, and the bulky guy next to her put a comforting hand on her arm. Jason wondered just who this guy was. He couldn't have been here long, but he'd obviously done something to earn Jackson's trust, as well as the legion stripe on his arm. From what Jason could faintly make out on his arm, his smybol was a spear- Mars.

"And i'm Frank Zhang. I'm a son of Mars and, well, I can...change shape."

A silence from the Greeks followed his announcement. Then Leo cracked up, laughing so hard he was wriggling in the chair. Percy was smiling too, though it was more of an expectant smile. "Get the fu-oh...ahahahahaa!" Leo laughed

"They don't belive you, Frank. Demonstrate." suggested Reyna, a mischevious grin slipping onto her face.

Frank stood, pushing his chair backwards...and suddenly, amidst a cloud of white crackling lines of energy which flickered around him, an anteater stood, tongue flickering lazily. The aura of white lightning appeared again, momentarily, fading as Frank reappeared.

Piper gaped, unable to help herself- Jason could not supress the widening of his eyes, and Leo's laughing ceased very, very abruptly.

"Well, yes-" Jason could tell Reyna was trying hard not to laugh "- formalities and joking aside, let's get into the meat of the matter, if you will. Now, we've been assured by our other praetor, Percy, who you all know, that you Greeks come here in peace. You haven't made a move, and Percy has given us more than enough reason to trust him, so i'm going to place the same trust in you three," she said, gesturing at Leo, Piper, and Annabeth. "You're here because apparently the time of the Great Prophecy is upon us- but let me warn you. The Romans here lost their eagle after a man attempted to interpret the Prophecy Of The Seven, even though Percy here has done his absolute best to reassure them, and so will be wary of you, not to mention the deep-buried resentment Romans harbour towards Greeks. They won't be willing to accept you as easily."

"We don't really need that, do we? After all, we're only staying here a little while- and while yeah, happy families is a great idea, we're going to be leaving pretty soon. I mean the only reason we're here is so we get the seven together, right?" said Leo, a little uncomfortably.

"This isn't about just getting the seven together, Leo. " Jason said. "Hera brought us together because Romans and Greeks together, together, will complete the prophecy. Not just because we can simply gather us seven and send us off on a quest. There has to be unity between the Greeks and the Romans, everywhere, not just between the seven."

"Jason's right." Said Annabeth. "It won't work otherwise. Gaea won't just be trying to prevent us from closing the doors of death, and, when it boils down to that final fight, it'll be just us seven against her, but in the meantime, she's going to be attacking everyone who's close to us- friends, people at both camps, and our families. All of us. The only way we can complete our quest and keep them safe is if we work together."

Their was a glum moment of consideration as Annabeth let that sink in.

"Shouldn't we- I don't know-bring our families here or something? To keep them safe?" Percy said nervously.

"No." Said Piper, and Jason started. Surely the last thing she wanted was for her dad to be taken away from her again? "If we bring them here, they be more at risk than they would be at home. Personally, i don't want to put my dad under that kind of pressure, living here. Besides, there's a chance they don't even know who they are or where they live, right?" she said, hopefully.

"How do we know who the seven are?" asked Reyna.

"Most of them are pretty obvious." Percy began. "Frank, Hazel, Piper, Jason, and Leo are all pretty special. There isn't much they can't do. But we need someone who can think for us, make the decisions and know what she's doing. Annabeth's the best person to do that." He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

Jason was a little jealous of their bond. Despite the fact that he had a girlfriend, who he liked intesely, and she him, of that he was sure, Percy and Annabeth were so harmonised.

"As well as that, i heard- read a prophecy...somwhere on our quest, and, well, it practically says she's coming along with us."

Jason waited to her this prophecy he'd heard, but Percy didn't seem willing to share.

"So i'm guessing...Reyna, right? Is the one who isn't one of the seven." Asked Leo.

"That's right." She said after a moment's consideration.

"I'm sorry- Leo, supreme commander, whatever- when are we leaving? And... what exactly are we doing? It's not really like the prophecy of the seven is clear about where to go." asked Frank.

Leo looked pleased at the 'supreme commander', less so at the whatever. "The plan is to-"

Jason couldn't help himself. "leo, you've never fucking planned anything in your life-"

"Well, the planning starts now. Or earlier, when i made this brilliant plan up." Leo grinned. "Anyway, we're going to get in not too long a time, so whatever."

"Hold it, Leo." Annabeth glared at him. "Who put you in charge?"

"Well, you know, supreme commander is an important position, but..." Leo's confident grin wavered under the stares of seven others. "What the hell. But it's my ship, all of you. On my ship, you follow my rules."

"Well, except when the leader issues an order, Leo. So, that's kind of bullshit." Jason rolled his eyes.

"So who is going to lead us?" asked Hazel.

"Why don't you put it to a vote? Then we'll see who's best suited to lead."

The vote went round the circle of chairs, and, despite the numerous hands for Percy and Jason, Annabeth was the winner. While Hazel and Frank didn't vote for her, Percy's hand, added to the three others who did, was enough to secure her position.. Reyna never cast a vote, just watched, a finger tapping her jaw as she rested her head in one hand.

"Well...I guess the best thing for us to do right now is to go and take a look at the Argo II. We can get everyone arranged in a sleeping spot, and get all our stuff on board, so we don't have to spend any time preparing." She shifted, settling into a role. Getting used to giving the orders.

Leo

After the seven of them had departed, Reyna had left them, and returned to the headquarters of Camp Jupiter, which she had called the..._principalis_? Either way, she was glad to be clear of her. Her piercing gaze definitely made him uneasy. It was as if she knew too much about him for him to be entirely comfortable around her- and while of course that couldn't be the case, it certainly felt like it. He was waiting, with Jason, Piper, Annabeth, and Percy, and to be honest...he felt a little embarassed. A little like the odd one out.

Piper had her arms round Jason, and he had his arm over her shoulder. They kept talking in undertones, which at the same time made Leo feel like they were talking about him behind his back and also want to run over there and interrupt. On his left, on the other side of the rope ladder he had one hand on, were Percy and Annabeth, who were in each others' arms, whispering and laughing and making out, though they had the grace to stop pretty quickly. Sometimes.

Of course, Leo really wanted to annoy them- he'd never seen Annabeth so happy, or so mushy over anyone. _Well, she was pretty beat up when he wasn't here,_ he reasoned. The blonde would probably slaughter him if he did anything to interrupt her- she knew how to use her knife, on demigods and monsters, and, well, he didn't fancy getting run through, even if it was after lunch.

As for Percy... he'd heard so much from the other campers, his siblings in Cabin Eight, Annabeth, that he was practically expecting this nine-foot tall, insanely ripped guy to be waiting for them when the came down from the Argo II. But he wasn't anything like that- he was pretty tall, sure, but the guy wasn't any more muscular than Jason, probably less. He did have, though, that aura of...what was it? Confidence? No. he was confident, but he didn't radiate it. Power. That was it. Although he didn't show it, if you looked into the green eyes under the black hair you could see a dangerous half-blood.

He was a nice guy, though.

That didn't mean he wasn't going to annoy him.

As the two they were waiting for began to come into sight through the darknening air, Leo breathed a sigh of relief. "Alright, let's not give these timewasters any appreciation, lovebirds- let's get on board!"

As he entered back onto the Argo, he breathed a sigh of relief. Back...home, it felt like. Away from the weird Romans in their own city giving him the stare-down. Still, he was about to be joined by the others, so he'd better put on a good performance if he wanted to get this trip started right. Still, there wasn't any room for him, especially seeing as there were two couples already on the ship. Still, Hazel was kind of cute, he mused. Still she isn't out of my league; and that puts her out of the question.

Annabeth, Percy, Hazel, Piper, Frank and Jason came up through the rope ladder one at a time, until, finally, the seven demigods of the prophecy were settled on board the Argo II.

Two hundred feet long, the Argo had plenty of room for the 30 foot widthways and lengthways cabin placed 50 feet from the rear of the ship. The cabin had a partially glass roof and glass walls, the supports lacing the ceiling solid steel. The small cabin had a series of beanbags in and a plasma TV in, tuned in to Hephaestus TV. twenty-five feet down from that, a smaller cabin, with two swivelling chairs and a series of navigational instruments inside, had been built from reinforced glass and Celestial Bronze supports. Just inside both of these two huts were weapon racks within carbon cases, guns, swords, spears lined up alongside each other. The sides of the ship were braced with rails that went up to just above their waists. All of the huts upstairs had circular doors that spiralled open when you pressed the open button. The stairs to the lower levels was protected by a slanting bronze structure, sealed with a pressure hatch.

"Alright, ladies and gentlemen. First, we've got two rooms, sorry about the lack of space, we probably could have all had our own if we hadn't spent so much time on making sure it could fly- but anyway, one's got four beds, and the other has three. Well, i don't know about you guys, but i'm thinking boys and girls?"

But Piper had something to say. "Actually, you know, how about Jason, me, Percy and Annabeth in one, and Frank, Hazel, and Leo in the other? That sounds better to me, to be honest." She was obviously supported by Annabeth, standing next to her, who gave her a smile and put a supporting hand on her shoulder, nodding appreciatively. "I agree with Piper, you know. I think that's best." she said.

Leo had never really understood the feeling of annoyance towards others. Now, as his face turned the same colour as betroot, he felt he understood quite perfectly. "How is that fucking fair!" He cried. "I don't even get a say? I want to share a room with guys, not beast boy and Peanut here. Or is it Hazel? Yeah. Come on, guys, please-"

"Leo, actually," Annabeth interrupted, "Didn't you have that room built just for you? You know, the supreme commander's master bedroom? Just for you? The one with the double bed?"

While Leo was under verbal abuse by Piper and Annabeth, Jason and Percy stood petrified. Maybe they think their girlfriends are going to put collars on them or something, Leo thought. "Ladies-" he protested, to no avail.

They just fluttered those long eyelashes and danced away, boyfriends in tow. Frank, Hazel, and Leo just stood there and watched, amazed.

Hazel turned to Leo, almost cautiously. "Don't feel like you have to sleep somewhere else, Leo. Us three can get to know each other better, if you want. Right, Frank?"

Baby-faced Frank nodded, reluctantly.

"Yeah, sure. It'll be f-fun." Leo stuttered out.

"That's great!" Hazel replied happily. "Well, we're going to go and put our stuff into our room, Leo- do you want to...show us the way?" she asked.

Leo, about to run into his master room, bury his head in his pillows and scream and cry for all he was worth, without realising Frank and Hazel were standing in the hallway awkwardly waiting for directions. From him.

"Over there behind-actually, you can just! Follow-Percy...fuuuck." his voice trailed off as the four went below decks to their rooms, now out of sight, only their voices remaining, faintly so.

"Please, Leo?" asked Hazel.

Frank gave her a curious look, like _how did he get in your good books?_

Leo paused for a moment, then shrugged. "Ah, what the hell, i might just as well." He grinned cheekily at Hazel. "Just to, you know, check everything's going on smoothly down there. Supreme commander; that's a serious responsibility, you know." he added quickly after he got a look from Frank. Don't really want to mess with a guy that big, who can change shape, not to mention. Even putting the fact that his ability to proverbially mess with fire had killed his mother to one side, shapeshifting was something Leo was envious of. Still, he reasoned, at least he can't build something like this. The Argo II was his masterpiece. A thousand years from now, he reckoned, people would be discussing the legendary exploits of the supreme commander Leo Valdez aboard his magnificent ship, the Argo II.

He led them down into the berth of the ship, where the ship opened out into a wide, spacious area. There were doors, trapdoors, and behind the stairs was the cockpit. Well, when you say cockpit...

The only resemblance it bore towards a ship was the glass opening that looked out into the sky, over Camp Jupiter.

Other than that, a projector was mounted on the ceiling, beaming light onto the flattened section of the wall in the middle of the glass section, made of wood. The image was a view of the Argo II, but as if from a hundred metres above it, so that he could see all angles of the ship possible from a 45 degree angled view in the air behind it. An array of glass circular desks with neon lights tracing the curved edge right the way round was in front of the projector. A keyboard was in front of a monitor, the joystick from the Learjet was 'plugged' into the desk, which had power outlets, USB ports, and other integration sockets without having any other outside source of power, his sound board lay on the left of the desks, and a pair of Wii remotes on the right-hand side, anchored into their docking station.

"How did you get the view to be like that?" Frank asked, amazed.

"Oh, boy. You have no idea. Lot of messing around with birds. wires. Piano music and other tortures. And a fake eyeball."

"What? How does that work?" Hazel asked, puzzled.

"Er- it doesn't matter, Hazel," Frank said, touching her arm. "Come on."

Leo didn't get why Frank was so protective of Hazel. Were they dating? It was difficult to tell, but he thought so. I mean, sure, the girl was about two feet tall, but she'd come from Camp Jupiter, right? It's not like she wouldn't be able to use that sword she had.

Leo led them to one of the two doors in the ship that was close to the pilot's hub. He kicked the door open, and ushered the other two inside.

Piper

Annabeth went in first, Percy in tow.

She'd seen Percy Jackson in a photo before- she'd decided he was good-looking then, but he was very much more so in reality. If she wasn't with Jason, and Annabeth wasn't intrisically linked with him, who knows...

But she was with Jason, she reminded herself, and she felt like jumping for joy. He was next to her, an arm around her waist, golden air and pale eyes, scar on the lip- he was hers. He tightened his arm around her waist and gave her a smile, as if he was reading her thoughts. Though she was pretty sure that wasn't the case, she wouldn't have a problem letting him know how she was thinking.

They followed in afterwards. Never mind the fact that Leo was a little over-enthusiastic at times- she was glad for the comfort of the room. The door opened into a spacious room, with a two beds half a metre away from each other, and then the other pair of beds about four metres away, the foot of the beds facing the door. On the left side of the left beds, and on the right side of the right beds, two balconies had been decarated with chairs, a table- everything to make the demigods with the fate of the world in their hands comfortable.

In between both pairs of beds, a table lay, with three draws and a Lava lamp on it. There was a cupboard on both sides of the room, a single bookcase on the far right, and a rack of swords on the far left.

Jason slipped his arm from around Piper's waist. He slung his bag off his back, and let it slide onto the floor by his bed. He slept by the balcony, and while he was always the one to close their balcony door, Piper liked the sound of the wind outside as the ship moved.

He came back over, nervously running a hand through his hair. "That's all the stuff I took from my old house. I didn't really take anything worth much, I guess- strictly only sentimental value. If it's too much next to your stuff, you know, i'll just keep it in my bag."

He put two arms around her waist, slowly, and kissed her. Piper leant up and into him more as he did, looping her arms around his neck. After a moment she took her arms away and pulled away from his lips, placing her arms on his as she drew in an deep breath. "Jason- we'd probably better wait until after- there's, um, things to do." She pulled away from him, unlacing his arms, although the sense of reluctance was present in both of them.

As they walked out, Piper was faintly aware of Percy and Annabeth behind her, but in a moment of worry, her mind was far too busy to consider the two. Despite the fact that she was with Jason, even though that Reyna seemed to hold his affections, though to a lesser extent, and their relationship was very, very good- she couldn't help but let that secret she'd been holding back, imprisoned in the back of her mind, slip forward, scrabbling for purchase in the ledges of her brain. She was worried about that particular problem, more than she should be- but she couldn't let it bother her now. That would've taken priority over most other things normally, but when you're on a quest to defeat Gaea, there isn't much else that's important. As it shuffled forward again, she desperately shoved it aside, right to the back of her mind. Later, she thought to herself. Later.


	3. Chapter 3

3. A few people may have been wondering what the muckup with the story was- I put the same document as the second chapter, without realising I had to upload stuff- I'm still fairly new, but i'm getting into it; i'll have everything nailed down soon enough. So anyway, because of the mix-up i was late with the second chapter, so here's the third chapter, early. The fourth chapter will be coming on time, for those of you who are paying attention to the story...and thankyou to eveningstar1996 and BananathePhone for following, and to the prior for a favourite.

Hazel

Hazel walked into breakfast, still rubbing her tired eyes. She brushed her hair over her ear and walked over to her usual table- but no-one was there.

"Hazel!" a familiar voice cried. "Over here!"  
Frank, along with the other five, sat at a table, the one closest to the praetors, a seat empty for her. One of the people sitting down was Leo. Hazel hadn't felt half as brave as she had done standing up to Thanatos or Alcyoneus, fainting the moment he said his name. The moment he said his second name, she felt as if an entire house had fallen on her, and her world, and before she knew it, she'd sunk towards the floor, spinning down into the endless black thoughts of her mind. It was similar to death, in a way, only that sense of finality was incomparable, and the darkness afterwards was utterly, incomprehensibly absolute. She's known Sammy Valdez in 1941, not too long before she'd died. Being brought back to life was a surprise; the technology that was around currently was a surprise; the introduction of gods and monsters into her second life was a surprise; but nothing compared with having a reincarnation of him appear in front of her, as well as him being one of the seven demigods of the prophecy. In her old life she would have just considered it chance, but she knew now, as a demigod, there was no such thing as chance. She'd felt like she was betraying Sammy's memory when she'd even started to look at Frank in a different way to her friends, and that sense of betrayal had heightened when she'd seen that picture of him in her old home. She'd also felt that way when Gaea had shown her that image of her, married, happy as she was sinking into the mud in Alaska. She had known that it was fake from the moment she'd seen the people of the vision's pure marble eyes, but it still struck a sore nerve.

Now she could see Leo's face, the mirror image of Sammy, who had exactly the same surname (that had been the knockout), Valdez, she felt like her heartstrings were being pulled different ways yet again.

She couldn't even look at him without feeling her fingers tremble, her knees weaken- and worse yet, every time she looked at him, feeling those emotions she felt, she could almost feel her hands bringing the knife down into Frank. Sweet, simple Frank who cared for her so much. Frank was aware of who Leo was similar- well, identical- to, but he didn't have any idea of how much pain it was causing her.

She'd been overjoyed when she'd had all the attention after completing her quest with Percy and Frank- it'd been such a relief to have people paying attention to her, being friendly, but she hadn't felt one hundred percent comfortable. Now, she realised, she was about to get a whole lot more uncomfortable, even if she didn't have the stress of thinking about Leo. Was she going to call him Leo or Sammy? Hazel knew just what Sammy was like, and Leo seemed exactly the same. Joking around constantly, light hearted. Sammy would be a little weird for everyone else, especially him, so she'd keep it to Leo.

Everyone's eyes were on the seven. Whispers of greeks, magic, and war machines reached her as the Romans watched the demigods sat at the 'special' table. Eyes flickered to her as she walked over to the table and sat down.

"You sleep okay?" Percy asked.

"Yeah, fine thanks." Hazel smiled at Frank, who stopped eating for a moment to grin back, then shook his head as if trying to clear it and carried on.

Percy may have eaten a serious amount of food, but Frank ate like a starved Minotaur, shoving down every morsel down with a frantic air.

"How long before we leave, Leo?" Piper asked, delicately chewing on a pain au chocolat.

"Few days or something. There was something wrong with the ship last night- one of the sails was being a little unresponsive, but, it should be sorted by now, so unless something like that happens again, we'll be on our way soon.

"What time is it?" asked Hazel, yawning and covering her mouth.

"Coming up to eleven," Jason replied.

Hazel was nervous. She'd been nervous when she'd seen how much her brother was capable of. She'd been nervous when she'd introduced Percy to Nico. She'd been nervous when Percy and Jason had shaken hands. Now, after a whole night of deliberation, and after the excitement and interest had worn off, she was practically shaking in her boots. Around her, there was enough demigod power to defeat a god in seconds- both Jason, from what she'd heard, and Percy, from what she'd seen, had defeated a giant- Percy had defeated Frank's father- Mars! Or was that Ares- in single combat, and they'd both defeated Titans.

_Holy shit_, she thought. _If there's a fight, it'll be world war three. Inside the mess hall_. She almost laughed at the prospect, then remembered all eyes were on her table. Laugh in this situation, and you'd be carted off to the doctor's in a straightjacket. She'd heard something about the romans dirlling holes into heads to cure disease. She shuddered.

"Reyna said there's going to be a senate meeting kind of around now, so we'd better go, guys," Percy announced as he finished.

Percy

The seven walked into the meeting just as everyone was sitting down, reminding Hazel of when she arrived late to the war games before the quest, except this time, no-one was going to threaten her for being late- indeed, everyone else, even the Lares looked as if they expected to be threatened by them. They took seats just to the right of Percy's praetorial seat, on the right of Reyna.

"Romans!" Reyna called. "I must say to you that-" she paused momentarily to glare at a kid who continued his conversation with his friend for a moment too long. "-that the Prophecy of the Seven," she took a breath, "is without a doubt coming to pass, and that I am of similar mind to my fellow praetor Percy that the seven do involve greeks and romans.

A clamor burst from the spectators beneath them, each and every Roman screaming for his own view. But, as always, there was one venomous voice that stood from the crowd. "How can we be sure? As far as our leader Percy's persuasive skills are trustworthy, i'll assume! And, being not quite the shining example of intellectual capacity Reyna may be, it is with regret that i must say: where is the evidence, Jackson?" spoke Octavian.

"Who are you?" asked Annabeth, staring at Octavian.

Taken aback by the intensity of her gaze, he was briefly lost for words, and then found his voice. "I-I am Octavian, augr of Apollo. I discern the wills of the gods; and who might you be?" His sneer indicated that he thought of her as lesser already; but his assumptions were shattered.

"Seeing as you're an augr, can't you see that Gaea is waking? I'm pretty the gods aren't just speaking about the conversations they've just been having, much rather the oncoming fate of the world that lies in the hands of seven demigods. Haven't you seen the giants with your own eyes? Or is this just an average day for you Romans? And watch it. He's actually pretty smart." She said.

Percy and Reyna grinned.

"We've all witnessed the onslaught these giants have brought to Camp Jupiter," called Percy, his voice echoing across the area. "Would you really leave the fate of demigods in the hands of a creature who is undoubtedly our most willing destroyer, and doom all those who live in the city by denying Greeks a chance for some...stupid idea that you've all persisted in believing, despite the fact you haven't come across any Greeks, apart from me, and now, them," gesturing to the group sat beside him, "for centuries. It's time to set aside our differences, because that's what Gaea is counting on."

"Inspiring, Jackson, but what do you wish us to do? You're the one with the warship!" said Octavian.

"I ask for nothing more than your trust. When we call for your help, when we call for demigods to aid us, are you gonna say no? Because you hate Greeks? Well, you didn't know I was Greek until i said so, and everyone seems to get along with me just fine, Octavian."

"When will you need us?" asked Reyna from beside Percy, who up until this point had been silent. "How will we know?"

"You've seen Iris-messaging first-hand, Reyna. This battle we fought, out there," Percy said, pointing to the Fields of Mars, which looked like a field that a giant baby had trampled through, "that was a skirmish. We have to protect Camp Jupiter, and Camp Half-blood. We don't have another choice. "

"What do you suggest, then?" She asked.

"I think we should have an exchange. Kind of like the one between me and Jason, but on a larger scale. Greeks move here, and Romans move to Camp Half-blood. Twenty-five or so demigods switching places with each other; that way we'll learn about each other- all this is going to do is make it easier for us to cooperate, to trust each other- and of course, aid when necessary, both ways."

Octavian shot to his feet, looking incensed.

"Praetor!" he shouted hastily, "This is ridiculous! Especially given our current circumstances, and surely if New Rome is your primary concern, as I've no doubt it is, you cannot consider this..." he glanced at Percy dismissively, "outrageous proposal."

But Reyna sat still and silent, musing. She glanced at Percy. Then at Octavian.

"I think...that this is a good solution," she announced slowly. "It's the best answer we have to Roman hate for Greeks."

"Praetor!" yelled Octavian in rage.

"Octavian, will you give it a bloody rest!" she shouted.

Percy nearly jumped out of his skin as she gave vent, and a large number of eyes turned towards her.

Even as octavian sank back into his seat, diminished in stature, Reyna calmed, and relaced in her chair. "Meeting adjourned. I would like to see all senior officers in the principia afterwards."

Percy sat as well. "Are you ok?" he said quietly. "Octavian's a real pain in the-"

"It's not just him, though, Percy." She said, looking exhausted. "Just the whole thing, trying to settle everyone, make them all happy and satistfied at the same time. It...it takes a lot out of you."

As the senate members filed out, the six who had been sitting on Percy's left came and clustered around the two.  
Annabeth hugged Percy as he stepped down from the Praetor's dais.  
"Oh my gods, percy! That was such a good idea! When did you come up with that?"

"Hey, it was a heat-of-the moment thing," he said.

"I think, actually, that you had a plan since you walked in; I think you were awake all night thinking about that," she said, smiling.

"A little bit," he admitted, "but mostly," he murmmured, "I was thinking about you." He kissed her on the lips lightly, making her smile widely.

"Percy and Annabeth, sitting in a tree-" The lone chant was cut off by a yelp of terror as Annabeth slid her arms from around Percy's neck and stormed off behind him. Percy turned to watch in amusment as she proceeded to belt the Hispanic kid a punch to his arm. He yelled in pain, and Percy wondered if he was the brightest guy. He knew he wasn't the best person to talk about brains; but, he was pretty proud about the way he'd handled himself in the Senate meeting, and he was also pretty happy when Annabeth said he'd done good. It felt like he'd eased the tension and his own worries. Still, annoying her? Not the best idea this guy had had. That was Leo, wasn't it? He seemed relaxed, not uptight at all, in fact he was about as loose as you could get. A bit of a joker. Just a bit. Sometimes it was all well and good being serious, but you needed some time to relax.

I'm always joking around, he thought. Still, not as much, and usually only when i'm about to die.

He'd spoken the truth earlier- he hadn't been able to sleep properly, worrying about Greeks and Romans- he'd had a dream about Octavian trying to set an olive tree on fire that he was repeattedly whacking himself on the head with. After stirring from that, he lay in his bed, thinking about Annabeth. Just the thought of her made him feel happy, comfortable inside. He glanced back. He saw Leo clutching his arm and hobbling after them as Annabeth caught up with him.

"So! Do you want to...show me around?" she asked happily, holding his arm.

He grinned down at her. He'd grown a tiny bit taller than her, which was marginally satisfying. He wasn't that petty, though.

"That sounds cool."

Leo walked back through the crowded streets towards the Argo II. He rubbed his shoulder, grimacing, at the spot where Annabeth had punched him- and boy, she knew how to punch. Still, annoying her was worth it just for her expression. That was what it was all about, watching some fools' faces scrunch up in absolute rage as he laughed his head off, literally. You know what he should do? Maybe he could make a video recorder, real small, so that he could play it back in super slow motion. Maybe he'd even play it back to the people he'd filmed. Still, now he had to go and check over the Argo II. Annabeth was off wandering like a love-struck harpy, leaving the rest of them with a day wide open. Other than that girl, Reyna, who was getting this exhcange crap sorted. Leo wasn't too happy. He'd really settled into Camp Half-Blood, and getting his new family bitchslapped by the arrival of twenty, thirty unfriendly Romans didn't seem like the best idea. Still, this Percy guy must have some kind of idea what to do, right? It's not like Leo was the most in-the-loop guy here. He hated the idea, as well, of having to stay in a room with Hazel and Frank. Hazel weirded him out a little bit- not that he was scared, but curious, wary was more like it. She had this kind of agelessness to her, a little bit like she'd just suddenly stopped aging. She could have passed herself off as two years older, and two years younger. And the guy, Frank. Well, when he'd turned into that ant-eating freak yesterday, he'd almost popped his eyeballs. A little creepy when you're looking at a rat, eagle, bird, rodent, and knowing that it could be him. It wasn't like Leo thought he was an agent of Gaea or some crazy rubbish like that. it was just...unnerving.

He'd felt, now, for a while, that he finally had a family that he could relax with. Not only were his demigod friends closer to what he was, if not exactly, but once he found out that practically all of them were friendly, he found it also far easier to leave behind his old solution of simply running away. He'd enjoyed himself spending so much time with Jason, Piper and Annabeth, even if having Annabeth in the same room as him made him a little nervous of sleeping, that he'd relaxed even more, almost forgetting that they were only four of seven. It was hardly the case that any of them left him out of anything, even if Piper and Jason were together, but he wasn't exactly grateful for the way the girls had shuffled him out of the room, especially Annabeth, with Piper's help, for Percy. His suggestion of boys and girls in seperate rooms' rejection was a shattering of his hopes for genuine time with the guys, oppurtunities for pranks, laughs, jokes.

Leo wandered down the road, keeping to one side, unconsciously keeping the bronze hull of the Argo in his sights as his thoughts, also drifted. He wasn't your average Hephaestus kid, bulky and heavy from hours at the forge. He was lithe, slim, light, constantly moving. That didn't stop him, and his daydreaming helped a pair of hands seize him by the shoulders and drag him into a side alley. It was particularly narrow, and lead to easy access to people's gardens, save for the doors.

He almost laughed, thinking it was Jason or someone else familiar trying to annoy him, and then he gasped for air as a fist sank into his stomach. Doubling over, trying to breathe, he saw out of the corner of his eye a semi-crouched figure sweeping another punch towards him. He reached towards the moving hand and pulled it over the right of his shoulder, using the figure's momentum to pull himself to one knee and one foot and to drive a shoulder into its stomach. It was his attacker's turn to draw his breath, staggering backwards. Leo clambered shakily to his feet, and watched his attacker draw a short dagger, glinting gold in the midday sunlight. He threw himself to the side as his assilant slashed downwards at the space where he had been a second ago,crashing against the brick wall, jarring his shoulder. He kicked upwards, sending the dagger flying out of the would-be murderer's hand. He set both hands aflame, and the figure didn't even scream or run, which was the usual 'first-time' reaction to his combustible body. He did hesitate, though, which gave Leo the opening to smash the figure, now visibly clothed in black, in his stomach. His other hand went under his throat and pressed him against the wall, flame now spreading across his clothes. "Who-"

Leo flicked his eyes to the side, to the entrance of the small alley, and saw a second figure pause there. His face was hidden by a hood, and as Leo watched, he pulled a mask from his jeans pocket and joined the person he was holding by the throat in attacking him. Leo cracked a hook across his pinned attacker's face, sending him crashing to the floor, turned, setting his whole body aflame in time to recieve a full-bodied tackle to his torso, throwing him viciously to the floor, atop the first body. His tackler let out a choked, panicked scream, leaping up and swatting madly at his clothes. Leo kicked out, landing a blow on his knee, forcing him to cut off, clutching at his knee, which could evidently no longer support his weight as he fell to the floor. As Leo stumbled desperately to his feet, he also drew a knife, identical to the first, and slashed upwards, slicing Leo's thigh even as he delivered a ruthless kick into the grounded figure's stomach, who curled up in pain, dagger thrown to one side in agony. A single kick to the head caused his movements to cease for the moment.

Leo staggered out of the alley, looked around, and slowly hobbled off towards the Argo II, ignoring the questioning, wary stares thrown the way of his sliced, battered body. He quickened his pace as he heard the weighty footsteps of legionnaires close. The last thing he wanted to do now, given the attitude towards Greek half-bloods around here, was to explain to some legion twat why there were two unconscious Romans lying in an alley with an incinerated set of clothes.

Leo hauled his body up to the top rung of the ladder descending from the Argo II. He rolled out, and feebly hit the switch to pull the ladder in. He didn't want another freaking nut coming in and stabbing him while he was lying there. He gradually pulled himself to his knees, and then to one foot, and then the other. He walked below decks, stumbling downstairs, and heard voices emnating from the door to one of the bedrooms. He used a hand to aid his feet in hauling himself through the door, which he barged open with his shoulder and a crash.

Inside, Frank and Hazel leapt apart from their sitting positions close together, jumping- Frank put himself between Leo and Hazel, unaware of the fact that it was Leo, and was about to shift when he saw Leo collapse onto his knees, holding his thigh.

"S-Leo!" Hazel cried, even quicker than Frank, who had started forward, darting round him to seize Leo's shoulder.

"Dude, it's cool. I won't ask what you guys were doing, i don't wanna know." he mumbled, laughing through half-closed lips.

"What the heck happened to you?" asked Frank, warily, face as red as Hazel's, as if he should be scared of the bleeding guy on his knees in front of him.

"Some stupid twats... tried to kill me. But it's ok, i'll be good," he groaned, standing again with Hazel's aid. He looked at her oddly as she gave him a helping hand up. How come she was being so friendly? "I just need..." he tripped over his own feet going back through the doorway. "...some nectar..."

"Leo?" Hazel asked, following him out into the hallway as he walked over to the storeroom, to the left of the bedroom entrance. He went in, seized a canister of nectar from a shelf, and came back out again, twisting open the flask and throwing back his head to gulp down the godly drink as quick as he could. When he'd finished, his skin felt itchy, raw, like there was an infestation of ants underneath his arms. But, on ther other hand, he felt a hell of a lot better save for that. The stinging, sharp pain of his cuts had vanished, and the dull ache of his bruises had dissapeared.

"Leo, what happened? Did someone attack you?" asked Hazel.

"No, no, i did this to myself, see-It's a new fashion! Yeah, well done." said Leo sarcastically.

He walked back into the bedroom he was sharing with the two, and sat down on his bed. He took a quick look in the full-length mirror on one side of the wall, and had a heart attack when he saw the cuts in his army jacket. "Look at my fucking jacket!" He yelled, shooting up again.

Frank hesitated midway through his step. "Why do you wear the jacket if it just gets cut?"

"That's like saying, why do you wear a shirt when you're anywhere? Because you want to be warm, and my figure doesn't give me the option of not wearing one, and probably because you're not expecting to be jumped by a bunch of masked, dagger-wielding psychos," he moaned. "Plus I always keep my stuff in here. Anyway, how did you guys get back here? I was walking back and I didn't see you."

"We headed out before you, remember? You were trying to- well, run away from Percy's girlfriend when we left."

"Oh yeah." he mumbled embarassedly.

"So who were these guys that did this?" asked Frank, his tone lighter.

"I was just walking along, minding my own business, thankyou, when some prick grabs me by the shoulders and hauls me backwards into this little kind of alley? It led to people's gardens, stuff like that. So anyway i manage to get this guy down after he pulls an Imperial gold knife on me, and then a goddamn second guy walks past, sees me and jumps in. Well, i gave him a seriously warm reception- turned out he had a knife too, which i realised only when he gave me this-" he gestured to the slash in his trousers, where his thigh was. "- and then i knocked him out, as well. I ran then, to come back here, because i heard some legionnaires coming round."

"So..." Frank hesitated. "Why didn't you stick around to explain?"  
"What, you think Romans and Greeks are best buddies now? I know, I know you two are...ok," he admitted grudgingly, cutting of their protestations. "They weren't exactly gonna play fair, huh? You have any idea who those two might have been? Got any psychopathic cultists hanging around here locally or something like that? Anti-hispanic movements?"

Frank and Hazel looked at each other, then said a single word: "Octavian."

"Wait...what? That guy who was talking in the senate meeting?"

They nodded.

"You're telling me that guy had the balls to send his buddies after me? The guy'd fall over if you blew at him, for crying out loud! And why would he want to? Seriously? I mean, i got his attitude towards Greek demigods and stuff all figured out, but really, trying to kill me? Gods."

"You have no idea what Octavian is like. He may not be the best guy in a fight, but he's seriously not the nicest guy at camp. Forget anyone you've seen that's got an unfriendly attitude- this guy outclasses them all." Hazel said. "He had the guts to stick his own spear through another camper's chest when her back was turned, you know."

"Don't remind me," Frank said, shaking his head as if to dispel a bad memory.

"What, is it okay to stab them like that if they're facing you?" Leo asked.

Hazel laughed. "it's not fun or anything, but unicorn horn shavings and our healers are usually enough to cure most people of pretty much anything."

"Good thing I only had a couple of scratches then," Leo laughed. "Too much of this stuff and you'll burn up. God snacks."

"No way."

"Yes way." Leo hesitated. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad sharing a room with them. "You guys wanna grab something to eat? I'm kind of hungry, but you don't have to, you know."

"Well I had breakfast but a snack wouldn't be the worst thing in the world," Hazel smiled.

"Yeah, actually. I'm getting pretty hungry again," Frank agreed.


	4. Chapter 4

**So Chapter 4 already- I know the update progress is really erratic; it's harder than you'd believe, actually, since there are complications to the update, but that is NOT an excuse. So i'm updating this Tuesday, today, the 24th, and i'm going to update early, on this Friday coming up, the next Friday, so that I can update every Friday after that, so Friday is the update day. If I can't make it, I will make a quick post to reassure, then delete it, since i know how annoying it is when you think you have a chapter, but it's just some nonsense from me. Sorry. Still, this is a short chapter- they're also going to get longer, a lot longer, at least 5,000 words longer, so that'll be better- apologies on that again: I shall extend my writing hours duly, greatly so. Thankyou for the patience.**

Jason

Jason and Piper walked down the streets pausing every now and then to look at items that attracted intrest of some form- or at least Piper did, and she did so while attached to Jason's arm. As they strode along, Piper secured to Jason's waist, he was assailed by the sudden feeling of being watched, feeling eyes probing at him. Eyes in the head of person who intended to cause him harm.

Feeling him tense, straighten and look around, Piper lifted her head to look into his eyes.

"Jason? What's wrong? Are you okay?" she asked.

"I just..." he shook himself. "No, no, it's probably nothing. Doesn't matter." He gave her a small smile, and she seemed satisfied, relaxing again. However, as soon as she shifted her gaze from his face, he looked around, trying to get a clear view of the area.

He slowed when Piper pulled her arms from around Jason's waist, and said, hand over her mouth, "Oh gods! Jason, look over there!"

She pointed, and Jason looked to where she was indicating. A wrecked chariot lay among the stone foundations of a long-collapsed building just beyond the outskirts of the Pomerian Line, a lone corpse lying over the remains of its skeleton.

Jason began to run towards the wrecked chariot, some 30, 40 metres from the road. Jesus, he thought, he must've been going pretty fast. As he neared, he saw the wheels scattered to the left and right of the main chassis of the chariot, spokes shattered. He saw two horses, once sleek and proud, flanks muscular, now matted with blood, limbs askew at awkward angles.

He leapt over rocks and bounded over ditches gouged in the grass off the road by chariot wheels, hearing Piper racing along just behind him; he then reached the body draped over a protruding rock, and crouched down.  
"The chariot's completely destroyed," Piper called. "Wouldn't even be useful as scrap metal."

Jason looked at the corpse from every angle, making sure it was dead, which it undoubtedly was, covered in blood from head to shoulders.

He stood. "I guess, then," he said grimly, "we'd better tell a centurion about this. They'll get someone down here to get him out of here and remove the chariot."  
As he spoke, he thought he saw the body moving, the back rising up as if a long-held-in breath had been quietly released. He knelt again. "Hey? Anyone there?" he said, unsure how to address a dead man. He reached forward and pressed his fingers to his neck, feeling around for a pulse. And as he found a beat, the corpse's eyes flicked open, revealing blue irises that focused on him sharply.  
He began backing away with a startled exclamation, but the figure darted up and grabbed a leg, sending him flying to the floor, cracking the back of his head on stone half-buried in the floor.

Almost completely stunned, he summoned a gust of air to push him to the side across the floor, sending him hurtling, back pressed against the floor, away from Fake Corpse.

He heard Piper talking behind him, and he blocked out her words by thickening air inside his ears, for even as he heard her tones he knew she would be charmspeaking, and her enemies would be running from her in terror if she commanded it, kiss her feet, kill each other if she demanded it. Unfortunately, he could no longer hear anything, which meant he wasn't aware of Fake Corpse running at him until he planted a boot in his upper chest, Jason feeling ribs splinter and crack inside as the impact hit him.

Almost passing out with the pain, he managed to bring enough energy into his will to throw himself up into the air, withdrawing his gladius from its sheath on his waist, which he dad retrived from Terminus' assistant at the edge of the Pomerian Line, and swooping down, half-blinded from agonyresulting from his sudden motion, sword scything in a curved motion to his side at Fake Corpse. He felt a moment of relief as his sword cut through something, the momentary resistance of the human skin, muscle and bone reassuring him he had detached a part of Fake Corpse's body.

He saw, through blurry vision, another figure running towards him, and he crashed into the figure, using his momentum to tackle the would-be murderer back ten metres metres, thrusting his sword through the figure's chest. As he got up, he saw that it was a girl, judging by the shape of her body who he had just killed.

More so a sense of danger than his obstructed sense of sight of hearing warned him of the third attacker, who charged towards him, swinging his sword over his head and screaming a soundless, animal scream.  
Meeting his blade, Jason cut one way and the other, finding, in the beginning, his attacks blocked, but eventually, with a feint to the side, he broke his defense and whipped the blade across his throat, making him fall earthbound, hands that had abandoned the gladius cluthing a ruined throat.

He threw himself into a jog with a herculean effort and lurched towards Piper's fight, which she was handling fairly well.

'Well' in that her enemies, three still standing out of the evident seven that had begun, from the bodies on the floor, were placing their weapons down with an utterly dazed expression on their faces, staring at her in awe as she delivered a kick in between their legs, whipped the hilt of her dagger across their faces, to send them to join their comrades already on the floor.

She held her dagger, Katoptris, in her hand for a moment, staring down at the losing side's victims.

"Piper!" Jason cried. "Are you ok? Did they injure you? You're alright? You sure?"

Piper's reassurances did nothing to seperate his relief at her well being and sense of victory from a feeling of guilt. He'd been attacked by people, however malicious their intent may have been, and had responded in turn, killing them- killing demigods, or legacies, people of Camp Jupiter. However much it had been a necessity, he still felt slightly guilty. They may have even been people he had known, put up to it by...by who? The first thing he thought was Gaea? Then he immediately realised that the effort she would have had to direct towards the camp to gain influence would mean that she wouldn't have been willing to place her followers' lives at risk- not out of concern, but for her future use. Octavian? He wouldn't be surprised. How to find out? Jason was a warrior, not a speaker. He didn't have the linguistical skill required to manoeuvre his way through senate members to find the information, so he would be direct. As direct as could be.

"Piper," he said, hands on knees. "Go back to the ship. Rest up there. I'll catch up with you soon, alright?"

"No! Jason, you're hurt! I'm not just to going to let you wander off to do whatever the hell it is you want to do? What...are you going to do, exactly?"

"Really," he breathed. "Taken worse wrestling with Clarisse." he gave a quick smile as he straightened up.

"Jason." Her voice was now irresistibly soft, silky even. Then she shook her head as if she was ashamed. "Please," she said, in a normal voice. "Come back- there's blood on the side of your shirt, please let's go and get some ambrosia!"

Jason hesitated. He wanted to go and get some answers, but how could he say no to her? Her emotion, next to her beauty, her desperation to get him some help- he couldn't resist.

"Alright then." He smiled, resigned.

Piper shouted up to the top of the Argo II. "LEO? LEO!"

A head poked over the side of the ship's hull- black, curly hair. The head withdrew immediately after seeing them, and a few seconds after, the ladder fell down to the ground, unfurling and rippling down to where Jason could steady it and haul himself up onto it.

Jason crawled out onto the deck of the Argo II, Leo helping him up. "Shit!" he gasped. "What the hell happened to you guys? Jason-oh dude, there's blood on your shirt!"

"I wouldn't even have come back here if it wasn't for Piper," Jason said. "If she hadn't been there I would've-"

"Been even more seriously injured than you are now?" Piper interrupted as she pulled herself onto the deck as well. "Jason, you would've died!" She crouched at Jason's side, and lifted up his shirt to peer underneath.  
"Oh my god!" She cried, tears glistening in her eyes, dropping the shirt. "I can see your fucking rib!"

"What?" Leo said. He scampered round to where Piper was and lifted up his shirt to get a look. "Whoa, dude, that is fu-"

"LEO! Go and get some nectar right NOW!" she yelled, furious, though tears still shone in her eyes. As Leo turned, she looked down at Jason. "You ever tell me you're fine again, and i swear i'll charmspeak you here if i have to," she whispered, holding his arm.

"I'm going, I'm going," Leo muttered. "To be honest, you can only see the tip of his rib. You ok if i get my camera while i'm down there?" he asked as he went belows decks.

Piper said something under her breath in Ancient Greek. Jason got the feeling she wasn't telling Leo what his best attributes were.

Now that Jason could finally feel his earlier adrenaline rush fading, he could sense the pain in his lower torso. It was as if it was buried, deep under his past adrenaline surge, barely noticeable. Now, however, that web of safety was fading fast, and it was becoming more pressing by the second, gnawing at the skein of energy that was, slowly but surely, dissapating.

He relaxed, letting his head drop gently back onto the wooden floor of the deck, trying to ignore the growing sensation of pain. He felt Piper holding his hand, and would've shaken her hand off if he'd thought it wouldn't hurt her- it barely hurt at all, and she was acting like someone had just stabbed him. Well, it had come close, but it hadn't actually happened, was the point.

Eventually Leo came back upstairs, the flask of nectar in his hand-Piper supported Jason until his back was further up, far up enough for him to drink from. He held the flask in his hand weakly, and tipped his head back to drink. Barely had he time to contemplate the taste which he remembered from the other incidents that had forced him to ingest ambrosia or nectar before the drink was mostly gone.

Now, he felt in top condition, and stood, looking at down at his shirt to see a medium-sized, about 3 centimetres across, patch of blood on it. "I'm fine, Piper," he reassured her, grinning. "Now, i'm-"

"Woah, woah, take it easy, golden boy- you haven't told us what the hell happened to you guys!" Leo said, a hand raised in protest.  
"Well, we were walking back here, and-"

"You where walking back here as well? So where exactly were you while i was on my way back, because i came straight back here. Almost." He added.

"Well, Piper wanted to go and check out some things Camp Jupiter has, you know, buildings and scenery...so we took a quick detour and ended up going the long way round. Next thing we know, we see a chariot, crashed and wrecked. And of course, it's a setup. We get attacked by a ton of people- most of them were wearing masks-"

"Masks?" Leo asked insistently. "Like, black ones?"

"Yeah, just covering their faces completely- well, except for the guy who was pretending to be dead. He gave me a bit of a bloody scare when he woke up, with me thinking he was dead. But more of them went after Piper- she's fine, no- and one of them caught me with a kick, so that must have been what splintered my rib. But the point of all this is-"

"The point of all this is that these pricks tried to fucking kill me as well!" Leo said angrily.

"What?"

"Yeah- he came in here after-um, yeah, so he came in and he was pretty messed up, he had cuts all over." added Frank.

"Yeah. Look at my _jacket_!" He hissed, pointing to the rips.

"Looks like you'll have to get someone to see about repairing that, then, Leo," Jason said with a smile. "Besides that, there's got to be someone behind this. And if i were to have guess, it'd be Octavian."

"Octavian..." Hazel looked thoughtful. "I guess so- but really? So soon after you arrived, and so soon after he was arguing with Percy in the senate?"

"Well, who else? It can't be Gaea, I mean we just got here!" said Piper. "And this guy Octavian doesn't seem to be the nicest around from what i've seen."

"My thoughts too. So, if you girls don't mind, we're going to go and have a word with him."

"Actually, Jason," Leo began, then was cut off by him.

"No, Leo, whatever it is. I'm going to get some answers from the goddamn creep, and no, we're not all going-"

"I think Piper," he interrupted, placing heavy emphasis on her name, "Might be able to help."

"Er...yeah. Damn. All right then, Piper, you'd better come with us. Thanks, Leo." he said. "We'll wait until a few hours until nightfall, actually. Might be good think about what to do."

Octavian woke as Jason shook his shoulder; his eyelids flickered open slowly at first, then shot open like he'd been tasered. Waking himself from his sleep, he sat up in his bed, set aside from the bunks of the other members of the First Cohort, to look suspiciously at Jason.

"Jason Grace. You know," he sighed, turning over as if to go back to sleep, "some people are ardent fans of their sleep. I think you could safely count me among one of those. So, if you don't mind, i'll be-"

"Octavian." Jason's voice was calm, but hard, like bronze. "I was attacked by a group of people tonight. They almost succeeded in killing me; and that was their goal, and if I had to point to one person to say, 'he did it,' it'd a person who's sitting pretty close to me right now."

"Someone-" he spluttered. "-tried to kill? You dare accuse me-"

"Hey, Octavian, isn't it?" asked Leo as he crouched down beside the furious Octavian. "You know, they had a pretty good go at me too. So if you're the bastard who sent those guys-" he leaned in for effect. "I think i'd like to have a little 'chat,' to be honest."

"Listen, Grace, i don't know what you've been taking- maybe Greeks have some kind of substance that addles their brains-"

"Octavian," Jason said. "One. More. Time. Tell me who it was."

"Please. One shout from me, and this whole Cohort will have their swords at your throats in a second." he snorted. "Besides the fact you can't threaten me, it-"

"Oh, I don't think so." Interrupted Leo with a sarcastic smile. Fruther towards the beds of the rest of the First Cohort, Piper walked up and down quietly, murmmuring to prone bodies to sleep, not to wake, to sleep deeply. Jason and Leo hemmed Octavian into a position where he could not see this, though, and for a moment he looked skeptical, then confused, then wary.

"Listen, both of you," he gestured with his hands, sounding a little more nervous, "I didn't have anything to do with this. I don't know whether you're trying to pressure me into doing anything, or making this up, but either way, I don't know why-" his voice faltered. "anyone would want to kill you."

"Octavian?" asked Jason cautiously. "Something you want to share?"

"I think you should share it," Leo added.

"Well, I can't really say that truthfully, because as we know," he said scornfully, "Gaea is at large, and i'm sure she'd be more than willing to slice your heads off."

Reading into Octavian sudden silence after that, Jason gestured in a 'carry on' gesture, a slow rolling of the hand.

"Well..." Octavian hesitated, looking around.

"What is it?" Jason said.  
"Yeah, come on, man! Spill it!" said Leo, annoyed.

"We've had...i've heard...whispers of...vague rumours, no more...of a presence here in Camp Jupiter. Beginning about a year ago, this was. What was implied, heard, passed on... what i got the idea of was of a cult, worshipping a deity of sorts. Here, in Camp jupiter," he confirmed, in response to Jason's questioning look.

"What kind? Worship some kind of vodoo god? Well why would they want to-" Leo asked quizzically.

"Not a god. The rumours are mixed up, jumbled, confusing to say the least, but the one thing they all agree on is the nature of the cult, who they worship. Tartarus."

Silence echoed throughout the room, even down to where Piper was supposed to be keeping the sleeping Romans asleep.

"Tartarus?" Jason whispered.

"Oh, shit." Leo whispered.

"Are you joking?" asked Jason. "Is this some kind of way of distracting us?"

"No, Grace. Rest assured, I myself have seen enough of the traces they leave to be utterly confident in their existence," Octavian said in a manner that suggested his personal thoughts on the matter were the most important thing to them.

"Fudge." Leo whispered, looking down.

Jason knew the feeling. not only were they apparently the seven demigods who had to withstand Gaea's infleunce on a very personal lvel, not only were they the ones who were supposed to rampage their way through her hordes of monsters, not only were they supposed to send Gaea back to sleep, but now, as if that wasn't enough, they had to withstand Tartarus' attentions as well.

His head spun as he tried to connect the dots. He was no Annabeth, but he figured he'd picked up enough from her and had enough common sense and knowledge to work this out.  
What's his connection, he thought. Why is he taking an interest? Think. Have I killed anything recently that is related to the guy. Even so, i'm sure he's got like, a million children. Is he connected to Gaea somehow? Didn't he have children with- Oh. Great. Seems like he's got a pretty good reason for trying to screw us over.

"The giants are Tartarus' sons," he whispered, a quiet whisper that was meant for Leo's ears, but it seemed Octavian got wind of his words, for he gave a slight, unpleasant upturning of the corners of his mouth. "So, you connect the dots. Given that you've taken for granted this cult exists now, you've got more to handle than you originally would, if you consider the fact that Tartarus, the spirit of the abyss is taking an intrest in you. I guess it isn't really surprising, given the fact Jackson killed another giant here, and apparently his 'friends' felled another during their quest. Though I find that hard to believe."

Jason was still too much buried in the shock to consider that two more giants had been killed.

"Well, gee, that's bloody brilliant," Leo said sarcastically, getting up. "I think i've heard enough from Mister Disaster over here," glancing at Octavian. "We'd better be heading back now we've had the good news."

"Yeah," Jason said numbly.

"I will not speak of this, Jason Grace-" Octavian began, sounding as if he was conferring a favour upon them.

"You're right you won't. You go on about us visiting in the night, no-one's going to believe we sneaked past the entire First Cohort. Anyway, you're still here. Maybe that'd tell people we aren't as vicious as you'd have us believe."

"You speak of them, we, and us. You're not making any sense. First you speak as if you were one of them, next you include yourself as a Roman," Octavian interjected conscendingly.

"I'm just a demigod," He replied, getting up. "I can share this world. There's enough room, even with the monsters."


	5. Chapter 5

**Well, I managed to get it up by Friday, success- Friday is the day, from now on. So, we continue, and- if you have anything to say, please share through a review; it really does make a difference. This is a pretty good length chapter, which is definitely better, I know how particularly short chapters are aggravating sometimes. So thankyou all those who read, especially those who follow, and please enjoy!**

Frank

Frank woke in the early hours of the morning, and got up to have breakfast, alone for once. It wasn't that he was finding Hazel problematic, far from it, but it was nice to relax for a moment- Hazel made his head feel all fuzzy when she was around, and he appreciated the opportunity to think clearly.

Chewing on a mouthful of battered fish, he tried to make up his mind about Leo. His opinion of him was mixed, not for reasons of personality, rather more the feeling Hazel was sometimes making eyes at him. The thing was, he knew her well enough to know she was doing it unconsciously- she did it without intent.  
But obviously the problem was, the problem Frank wasn't particularly happy with, was that it was happening at all. There was obviously something Hazel wasn't making clear, with the fainting and the squealing when he spoke for the first few times, but he wasn't going to pry.

Aside from that, Leo didn't seem to be doing anything to warrant Hazel's unsual behaviour. He was clearly a pretty nice guy, funny, easygoing and all that, friendly- he got the feeling they would have been great friends if Hazel hadn't just started to, unaware of it, shove herself in the way.

Shaking his head, he finished off the last morsel of food on his plate, and then stood up. It was usually during his lunchtime that he went and did some exercise, however now he decided to get it out of the way early. After returning to his bed, and changing into suitable gear, he jogged all the way down to the Temple of Pluto. Minute and considered bad luck as it was, it was rarely disturbed by anyone else save for Nico or Hazel. Hazel knew where he did his workout, but was usually off doing her own thing.

After the run down the road, past the pomerian line, over to the area just outside the temple, Frank slid to the floor quickly and began a cycle of press ups and sit ups that would allow him to mantain a constant rhythm, 10 each, 10 each, 10 each, 10 each, and so forth, abosrbing him into the realm of the purely physical.

In fact, past the time when had done 6 of those cycles, he was so absorbed he did not notice another pair of running feet stop and grind its upper body to a halt in the gravel, until he spun over on the one practiced hand to begin his sit ups, and saw Percy.

"Ha. Looks like you had the same idea," Percy grinned.

"Yeah, I woke up early for some reason," Frank said, giving his exercise a pause.

"Couldn't sleep, or...?"

"No, I wasn't tired when I woke up or anything, I just...got up early. Nice to forget everything for a little bit, you know?" He replied, arms knotted around knees as he sat.

"You're telling me," He said with a grimace. "Still. We all do what we have to, you know?"

He settled down beside Frank and began to perform similar exercise, though not the same- while Frank continued, after a moment's pause, his press ups and sit ups, working his upper body, Percy broke his way into a series of exercises that had him constantly moving, stretching, pulling, testing boundaries of all his muscles, actively moving around a great area of space than Frank used himself.

Either way, exercise was exercise, and the pair of them lost themselves in the invisible, heady rhythm that it pounded into their skulls.  
It could have been days, or moments later when he finished his exercise. The only way to really get fitter, was to push, push and push again. AFter every single bout, he was left exhausted, but he became tronger, yet every bout he pushed himself beyond the new limit he had set from last time. _Sometimes, _he thought wryly, _you've got to run before you can walk. _Time was not one of the few luxuries he had. Sitting up, he eased himself from the groaned, and gave a start at seeing two figures perched on the steps leading into the small temple that they had been exercising in front of.

He walked over to Hazel and Annabeth's sitting forms, wanting to talk, yet they seemed absorbed in talking to each other. Apparently they found each other too fascinating, though Frank had no doubts where their eyes had been moments ago. Looking back as they continued their talk, he saw Percy hadn't stopped. _Forget running_, he thought as he saw him continuing, _he's thinking more along the lines of flying_. Turning back, he saw Annabeth had lost interest in Hazel, and was staring back at Percy. He was amused, until he saw Hazel was looking, save in less of an adoring light. Clearing his throat, albeit quietly, he said, "How long have you two been out here?"

Annabeth started, and looked at him as if she were not sure he was there, glancing in Percy's direction again, then finally looking at him as if he were real for the first time. "...just about...ten minutes?" the words coming from her mouth coincided with Hazel's "only a couple of minutes, really."

He allowed himself a smile, and they both looked at him, as if they could not understand what in the world he had to laugh about. _In some respects, they are right. We don't have much left to laugh about. _

Plonking himself down next to Hazel, with Annabeth on her other side, he put an arm around her shoulder. Usually he didn't have the courage to do any more than that outside of when they were really alone, but there was hardly a crowd standing around them. Hazel gave a little look towards Annabeth, but flicked her head back round, looking at Frank, that he might have assumed it had not existed. Still, there wasn't exactly anyone looking at them right now, he thought, laughing inside, as he looked at Annabeth over Hazel's head, observing her head in a hand, tilted as she watched Percy, a strange look in her eyes.

He looked down, and started at Hazel's stare, that, unmistakably, said, _look at me, not anyone else. _

He smiled down at her and touched his lips to hers momentarily, which she leant up for, also quickly. He whispered into her ear: "How long have you actually been out here?"

"About half an hour," she said back quietly. "I woke and saw you gone, but I had some idea of where to find you. Annabeth came in as i'd just finished getting dressed, looking for Percy. I said he might have come down here, so she decided to come over with me as well."

"Half an hour?" he said.

"What's wrong with that? Something wrong about the fact that we want to see you two? Annabeth hasn't seen Percy in like, eight months, more, you know. That's a long time to go without seeing someone, you know- that's even if you ignore the fact that she obviously feels something just a _little_ bit stronger than simple liking for Percy." She responded, whispering. "Plus, it's not as if you two idiots don't enjoy the the chance to stare at us whenever there is one," she finished.

Frank felt his face flush. When did this supposed staring actually happen? Sure he'd spent a long time being only friends with her, doing pretty much everything with her, but was there really a chance that he'd had to just stare at her? It was't like he watched her sleeping. Although he could always hear her. And Percy had barely been around Annabeth for a day. Maybe it'd happened before, but the two have them couldn't have started disucssing that kind of thing already. He admired her a lot, more than a lot, her loved her warm, soft hair that curled around the top edges of her shoulder and her neck, he loved her gold eyes, and yes, fine, he'd spent more than a fair amount of time looking at her face. But still- _ she made it sound like i'm trying to stare down her shirts half the time!_ He thought indignantly, and the thought made him blush.

Looking up at him, she observed the spots of colour in his cheeks, and laughed slightly. Only she could laugh that way and make him feel as if she were siniging his praises.

Percy had finished, at last, and ambled over, obviously trying to recover form the intesnity of his session. "Where did you two come from?" He asked, surprised. "We've just come up to talk to each other," Hazel answered from Frank's shoulder. "Only been here a few minutes."

Given a couple of seconds, it was clear Annabeth couldn't have kept that up. But she shook off her dazed state, and stood

He turned away from them, belatedly not looking. He felt Hazel laughing silently against his chest, but when he looked down, she was as determinedly staring the other way as he was. He almost laughed himself.

For the rest of the day, events passed almost normally, even considering the journey they were surely close to embarking on. Frank and Hazel participated in a game of deathball, almost dying a few times before forcing opponents to defeat- Leo, Piper and Jason prepeared the Argo, that incredible flying ship, Leo checking over the ship's mechanical competence, Jason stocking the craft up on food, water, other supplies, as well as arrows, swords, daggers, Imperial Gold ingots that Leo said he wanted for a little 'project' of his. He'd been present when Leo had asked- well, he made his suggestion sound more like a fact he knew Jason would come around to accepting- for the metals, and that grin he had had on his face told him the result could be utterly disastrous. Or, considering Leo's ability with crafting, spectactular. Percy and Annabeth consulted with Reyna and leaders of cohorts, discussing which Romans were to pass over to camp Half-Blood, and which Greeks, chosen using the Iris-messaging system she had seen displayed before to consult someone called 'Chiron.' Annabeth and Percy had explained about the meeting- there were Romans who were willing to go, and there were some Greeks who were all right with the idea, but who would come as a certainty. It had been arranged, they had said- with a degree of relief and satisfaction.

Hour by hour, minute by minute, the day dwindled, until night fell. Each fell to sleeping, preoccupied with worries. Would they succeed? The prohecies never tended to say what would happen if the heroes of the prophecy died. Was it possible for them to die, if they were supposed to defeat Gaea? Would any of them die along the way? How many? Would their deaths, all of them, be what actually defeated Gaea? Sealed her into a preferably longer sleep? No-one knew.

After the group had finished breakfast, they walked out of the mess hall. None of them wore camp clothes- on the day of their depature, none of the seven wanted to remind the camp that there were two seperate entities in this war. The Roman camp accompanied them to the ship- families watched from doors, windows, terraces as the seven; Percy, Jason, Hazel and Frank each recieving a cheer and a wish of luck from many people and ascended the rope stairs into the Argo II.

When, finally, the seven reached the top of the ship, the seven together, on board the Argo II, Hazel felt a sense of determination, a sense of purpose. She was sure the other felt it as well- they clenched jaws, straightened backs, rolled shoulders- they knew now, that there was no going back - these seven chosen demigods would venture into the Underworld, to the heart of the earth and back in their quest.

Even though she, of all of them, had been closest to death- she'd died, many years ago- she felt strong, confident, reassured, for the moment. Then she realised that she was on borrowed time- the only reason Thanatos had left her was because she served a purpose. She had to save her brother. She had to help the seven close the Doors of Death, if she even made it that far without dying. She wasn't here to build a relationship with someone like Frank, who was so good to her.

Frank. Even though he was so physically solid, and powerful, as a demigod, his life was utterly synonymous with the well-being of a stick. Once that stick burnt, Frank died, she reminded herself, fingering the package in her jacket pocket.

She was slightly scared of the tall blonde, Annabeth, Percy's girlfriend. While she trusted Percy with her life, his girlfriend was so...in control of herself. It made Hazel feel nervous, scared she was too weak when there was someone that well coordinated and structured. While she seemed like a nice person, Hazel still felt wary, not in an overly terrified way, but nonetheless wary of her.

And Jason. Jason was back! In the short time he'd been back at Camp Jupiter, he seemed just as noble in every action, just as kind; now, however, a little more...lax. A little less keen to enforce order. He reminded her even more now of Percy.

"So where are we going first?" asked Piper.

"Our quest is supposed to take us to Rome first, and then Greece," said Percy, Frank and Hazel nodding in agreement.

"What, so, we just sail right off to Rome now? What about food? Water?" said Jason.

"Stocked up on food and water last night. The legionnaires were ferrying supplies to and fro from the mess hall into the ship," said Annabeth.

"Where, specifically, in Rome?" asked Leo.

"Well," Percy hesitated. "According to Thanatos, only one kind of demigod can read the signs which would lead to what we're looking for." He looked at Annabeth.

"Me?" she looked shocked, composure broken for a moment. "But...how? I don't..." for a second, her face whitened, and Hazel thought she was about to reveal what had scared her, but she didn't. In part, Hazel was glad. Whatever scared Annabeth was sure to terrify the living daylights out of her.

"Okay, well, we know we're supposed to go to Rome. That much we already know- so on the way, Annabeth, why don't you think about what Percy said? Maybe you can find out how you're supposed to lead us there."

Annabeth recovered from her momentary paralysis. "Okay. I guess, then, we'd better set off for Rome."

Frank

Frank, after unpacking his stuff into the circular three-bedded room he, Hazel, and Leo were settling in, went back upstairs.

As soon as he achieved the deck heights, he saw something that he thought could be very interesting.

Jason and Percy were going to do a little swordplay. Both of them had taken off their tops as the Argo II sailed through the air, the sound of a tapping of keyboards, swivelling of a joystick and cursing from Leo coming from the cockpit, the breeze enough for them on this sweltering day.

Annabeth, Piper and Hazel leaned with their backs to the edge of the boat, eyes flickering between the two heroes.

Frank had seen Percy fight. He knew he was incredibly quick and skilful, but from what he'd heard of Jason, he was just as good, if not better.

Jason, more heavily muscled but shorter than Percy, took his gladius from the side of the boat, at Piper's feet, where he'd left his shirt. Though not made of Imperial gold, the blade seemed...sturdy.

Percy's taller, lithe figure relaxed as he uncapped Riptide. He dropped the pen cap onto the floor and walked forward into the middle of the deck.

This should be...different, Frank thought.

Percy was first to strike, a sideways cut threatening to end the fight before it had barely begun. Jason was at a disadvantage without the golden pilum he'd apprently used, as well as the fact that he was shorter than Percy. But, nontheless, he blocked the attack, sword relfecting Percy's blow.

Percy whipped around in a circle, and his sword lashed round. Jason blocked the swipe again, and the two began an incomprehensible dance, swords flickering at an incredible pace, Percy's Celestial bronze sword swiping energetically into Jason's gladius, spinning and circling, demonically slashing at Jason's defense, probing for weaknesses. Jason blocked and blocked and countered, then blocked, countered again, the sparks of sword on sword littering the deck as Jason's impenetrable guard moved to block Percy's move while it was halfway in motion. This was a real clash of differences- Percy's blur of aggressive slashes and cuts in the Greek style countered by Jason's rock-solid Roman legion training. The unstoppable force meets the immovable object.

Percy slowed his attacks slightly, gently weaving his blade all over Jason, point of his sword placed in multiple locations at once, it seems, but Jason would not release his hold, it seemed, until suddenly Percy made an overly long lunge - was that deliberate?- and Jason spun athletically sideways, bringing his sword over and round and down to rest- Percy rolled forward, using the over-the-top movement of his attack as momentum, twisted, and placed his sword to the back of Jason's neck.

Frank, Hazel, Piper, and Annabeth let out simultaneous held-in breaths.

"Fucking hell. Playing with knives from an early age I see." came another voice. They all turned, Percy dropping his sword from Jason's neck, Jason relaxing. Leo stood on the deck behind them.

"Leo!" Annabeth yelled. "The ship! What the hell are you doing up here?"

"Calm the fuck down-" Leo stopped as soon as he saw Annabeth's face. "No, wait! I just stopped for a minute because I got something on the radar."

"Leo, the radar's up here, dumbass," Piper smirked.

"Yeah, not fucking helping here Piper. Look! Annabeth! Go check the freakin' radar already!"

"Wait. Seriously?" Annabeth asked.

"Yeah! Of course!" Leo said enthusiastically.

Annabeth pulled her eyebrows down in an expression of scepticism. Then she turned away and walked over into the hut containing the instruments. As soon as she turned around, Leo also turned and sprinted away frantically, arms flailing, into the other hut.

Annabeth came out through the spiralling door. "Leo, seriously? Why didn't you tell us sooner?" she said, annoyed.

Leo's head popped out of the other cabin. "Huh? Say whaaat?"

"The 'something' you saw, Leo? Remember?" said Jason, trying not to laugh.

"Hold on. Annabeth, are you kidding?" said Percy.

"Er...no."

There was a sudden flurry of movement involving mad dashes for various things- Percy and Jason ran into the cabin Annabeth was in to see the object, Piper went over to drag Leo out of the other cabin by the scruff of his neck, and Frank and Hazel scrambled downstairs to grab Frank's bow and quiver and Hazel's spatha.

"How big is it?"

"Always so bloody useless-"

"Pretty big. Unless..."

"Ah! Damnit! Get the hell off me Piper!"

"Unless what?"

"It could be a group of smaller creatures."

"Where is it? Do I need to shoot anything yet?"

"I'll take a look with a projection."

"Get up Leo! We need you down below on the weapons."

"It's a huge storm. Lightning and everything...usually weather wouldn't come up, but..."

"Is it normal weather, Jason?"

"One minute you're goddamn well dragging me along the floor, the next it's 'oh, Leo, get up! You're so lazy!'"

"I don't think so. Usually i can tell, and this...this isn't natural."

Percy looked at Jason. "We've got a fight. What could it be?"

He looked at Annabeth. "Storm spirits," they said simultaneously.

Percy, Annabeth, and Jason rushed out onto the deck. Sure enough, a huge mass of dark grey clouds were approaching with speed, even though the Argo II was stationary. Rain pored down underneath the clouds and lightning flickered.

Leo vanished below deck- Percy and Jason held their swords at the ready, sticking close. Frank had an Imperial gold arrow nocked into his bow, Hazel hefted her spatha, Annabeth her knife, and Piper Katoptris. The thunderstorm passed them overhead, and then settled, as if deciding it was going to stay for a while.  
"Jason!" Annabeth shouted over the dripping rain, howling wind and roaring thunder. "Keep the lightning away from the ship!"

"I'll try," He yelled back, "but i'll need someone to keep them off me!"

Him and Annabeth looked at Percy.

"Yeah, i got him." he said, grinning. Although the rain pattered all around him, Percy wasn't getting wet- he stayed dry, his hair, unlike the rest of theirs, still composed.

Percy

Despite the fact that Percy had never seen these storm spirits Jason and Annabeth seemed certain were their enemies, he was feeling optimistic. Whenever he used to feel that way, he knew something was going to go wrong- but for know, with friends, those who trusted him and loved him around him, he was confident. He could feel the rain pattering, dripping down his chest, still bare, but he wasn't wet- each raindrop felt like the first on dry skin. He held Riptide in one hand, giving it a little spin every now and then to feel its reassuringly comfortable weight. Jason held his sword in one hand and raised the other to the skies. Percy had never felt comfortable in the air- the Argo II was different, being a boat as well, and now, as the son of Zeus channeled lightning away from the boat, he was starting to feel that unease again. Blue arcs of electricity sparked and flashed all around as the rain and wind screeched, lightning hurtling dead on towards the ship before suddenly veering away to dissapte harmlessly into the skies pre-impact.

He saw, distantly, shapes flickering through the sky, humanoid figures with wings sweeping through the sky, horses galloping towards them swiftly, figures composed of relentlessly shifting, gray matter, electricity crackling and sparking, miniature thunderstorms themselves.

"Planning ahead, that's what this is all about," Leo's amplified boomed from hidden speakers. "You ready, people?" Everyone shifted one last time, Percy rolling his shoulders, Jason cracking his neck, Piper moving her legs, Frank adjusting his arrow, Hazel blinking her golden eyes.  
"Let's do it. Get ready to eat crossbow!" Leo howled in glee from the speakers.

The crossbows mounted on the sides and the deck of the Argo II began to swivel, tracking the anemoi theullai as they darted towards them. Bolts flashed like lightning towards their targets, celestial bronze arrowheads piercing non-existent flesh and disspating the storm spirits. Human-shaped figures clutched their injured area and tumbled from the sky, disintegrating as they did so, horses neighing as they were struck down.

At the same time, the dubstep album Leo had apparently played began to come through the speakers, the electronic build-up raising goosebumps, so loud as to send a quiet vibration through the deck, sound shivering and whispering through the ship.

Then the storm spirits landed, human figures leaping on top of horses as they neared, the horses contructing their own flashing armour, the other storm spirits unsheathing swords of gaseous matter.

The storm spirits and their mounts crashed onto the deck, prancing about, charging towards the half-bloods.

One made staight for Jason, and Percy barrelled for it at the same time.

Rain splattering the deck as he ran in his shorts and trainers, he built up speed until they reached each other. He ducked down and sliced through the horse's vaporous legs, feeling momentary resistance in Riptide as he cut through airy manifestations of the equine anatomy.

The human spirit dropped from his dying mount and turned to face Percy, who, to it, was now the major threat. Dimly, around him, Percy was aware of the others fighting, but for now it was him and his enemy.

The storm spirit roared, and charged Percy. Rain fizzled around it as its grey sword of solid air clashed with Celestial bronze to the heavy sounds of dubstep bass. Catching the strike on his hilt, Percy gritted his teeth and shoved, testing the monster's srength. Neither of them refused to budge, straining and grunting as they heaved against one another. Percy stepped back and let the monster push past him- he brought Riptide round and cut into its wrist, momentarily in perfect time with the pulsing wub-wub of the deep sounds the ship was playing, causing it to screech and drop its sword. He kicked it with the underneath of his foot in the stomach, but his blow passed right through it- the monster leapt through Percy, who gave a shudder as it did so, and turned to face him again. It tried to punch him, and Percy countered its attack, ducking under, spinning and brutally cutting the blade into the storm spirit's neck, the slice hurling it off its feet, dissapearing into Tartarus in midair as the throbbing electronics came to a temporary pause.

He turned, relaxed momentarily, and realised his mistake. In fighting the lone anemoi thuellai, he'd become drawn a little too far from Jason, still concentrating. Another monster bore down on him, raising its sword for a cut. In desperation, Percy hurled his sword, which passed through the creature's mount, causing it to collapse to the deck prematurely. He charged at it, tackling it to the ground. They rolled over and over, and in between spins, percy could see a sea eagle, webbed in white lightning, clawing a storm spirit to shreds, Annabeth shoving her knife through the back of one closing in on Piper, a crossbow bolt impaling one to a cabin with a gurgle. They came to rest suddenly, the apparition on top of percy. As it roared in rage, Percy replied with a punch, snapping its head to the side. He used his arms and legs to lever the storm spirit off him, throwing it behind him.

Percy couldn't see a weapon, and he knew he was at a serious disadvantage when the monster withdrew another sword and ran at him, bellowing.

Water. It was all around him. He channeled the rain into shield- a solid aqua copy of the shield his brother, Tyson, had made for him. The creature smashed its sword against the shield as percy held it up, for its sword to rebound off. Thrusting out his hand, rain funneled itself, shaping itself to his will, an orb of water surrounding the monster and crushing it.

Checking his pocket, he found his lethal ballpoint pen again. Uncapping the pen with his teeth, it expanded once again into Anaklusmos.

Jason seemed to stop his task, relaxing and lowering his hand, blinking at the piles of gold dust around him.  
"What's wrong?" Percy yelled over the storm.

"They've stopped- I don't think they've got the energy to do it any more." He shouted back.

Jason ran over to Percy, and as three more mounted thuellai leapt onto the deck, they stood almost back to back, swords out.

Jason leapt into the air, ten feet high, the air hurling him up as he commanded. He used his own manouvre to bring his feet against the chest of one of the storm rider, sending it flying from the back of its horse; he zipped away from the pounding hooves of the horse, somersaulting over Percy's head to block a sweeping cut at Percy. Percy spun around Jason, sword spinning in the imitation of a whirlwind to split open the horse's flanks. Light tinkling dubstep flowed into the air as the two wove their fighting styles together in a perfect style, unrelentingly powerful and utterly impenetrable. Behind them, a crossbow bolt whizzed in between their heads to join two spirits together with a wail and the creation of a doubly large pile of dust.

Seconds- or was it minutes- later, the last of the demonical entites surrounding Jason and Percy were reduced to ash. They turned to see a colossal bear smashing both fists down on a helpless monster on the deck, putting paid to the last of their enemies. The bear shifted to Frank, with his bows and arrows on his back.

The music cut off. The crossbows ceased all movement. Piper sheathed Katoptris, holding up in the rain for a moment to clean it of monster muck, and then went over to the railings. "Well," she said. About to continue, Percy felt time slow as a single storm spirit popped up with a demonical energy like a jack in the box in front of Piper, who began to stumble backwards, face contorting in terror. He saw Jason throwing his gladius to one side, and running forwards, leaping towards the thing raising a sword of smoke to smite Piper where she stood, from twenty feet away, literally flying through the air as his mind-over-air control pushed him forward even more. Jason tackled the storm spirit back into the stormy air, away from the Argo II.

"JASON!" Piper screamed.

"Frank!" Percy yelled. "Go with him!"

Frank understood, and without further delay, leapt over the side, plummeting downwards in human form after Jason and the storm spirit.


	6. Chapter 6

**Another chapter. I guess the amount of chapters, relevant to weeks as they are, gives me an indication of just how fast time is going. These summer holidays vanish like nothing. Still, it means more writing to do, which is always enjoyable, and it takes me ever closer to the actual release of the Mark of Athena, which I cannot wait for. Please do enjoy, and a review would be much appreciated plzkthnxbai**

Frank

Frank spread his arms and legs and out as he leapt off the ship, plummeting downwards towards the earth- through the furious grey clouds, rain and fog, he could see a glittering blue surface- the sea- very faintly, but getting closer slowly. Below, he could also see a spinning, chaotically tumbling duo of figures, fists punching, knees striking, wings flapping powerlessly with the weight of another person.

He shifted form, his legs shortnening, arms growing feathers and increasing in width- the huge sea eagle tucked in its wings and hastened its descent towards Jason and the venti.

With his amplified vision, Frank could make out Jason's calm features- even though the guy could apprently fly, Frank wouldn't have felt comfortable tackling the venti and hurtling down to earth without the wings that were tucked around him.

He soon caught up to the pair, headbutting and kicking each other, the venti roaring a stormy bellow of defiance in Jason's face- before Frank could sink his claws into its back, it managed to wind Jason, smashing an eretheral fist into his abs, push itself away, and draw another buzzing, artificial sword. Jason recovered, wheeling around in midair, and used the wind to propel himself like a semi-divine rocket towards his enmy, even as the storm spirit flapped its grey wings and shot towards him, sword raised.  
A bolt of lightning flashed from the sky and curled around Jason's fist as if caught in a whirlpool as they collided, the venti's neck snapping as the energy surrounding Jason's hand transferred right into its ghostly head, gold dust already flinging itself downwards; but Jason gave vent to a bellow- and even as Frank finally seized Jason securely around the arms with his claws, he saw the reason for his pain. A charred, smoking hole was in Jason's side. Already the blackened skin was cooling and the smoke was fading, but there was still a livid wound in Jason's side.

A sea eagle's flight was no easy task, even with it's gigantic wingspan-countered by the drenching rain- as Frank and a limp Jason ascended, the clouds remained in place, deciding to stay- however the lightning ceased to flash aroundthe sopping wet Argo II, of which Frank could see the celestial bronze underplating.

Quickly he tired of his uphill struggle, and by the time he finally managed to get above the deck of the Argo II, the other demigods' anxious faces below him, he phased out of his eagle form before he'd landed, sending Jason crumpling to the wooden deck and himself not much better off, utterly exhausted and weak, landing on his feet, staggering and tripping into the wall of the cabin, sliding down onto the ground.  
"Frank! Frank!" Jesus, come inside," Hazel said, concerned. Percy rushed over, pulled him upright by his arms, ignoring his soaking clothing- which apparently, was affected by weather to the same extent he was when his shape was changed, and put his arm over his shoulder. "I've got him, Hazel- let's get him into the cabin-" he nodded over to the cabin that didn't have the instruments in -"can you get some ambrosia and nectar? For Jason as well!" he called as she ran out.

Percy aided Frank, walking with him supported into the cabin, until he could swing Frank's arm round and lower him gently onto one of the beanbags. He knelt down next to Frank for a moment, and then Annabeth and Piper crashed in, exposing the floor of the cabin close to the door to the rain outside as they carried Jason in between them.

Lying on the beanbag, Frank saw through his flickering eyes Jason, his dead weight indenting into a beanbag opposite. Then he saw Hazel, who even though she had a bleeding cut along one cheek, her shirt torn, her warm curls lathered to her back, her clothes sopping wet, looked beautiful to Frank. She held one of the many flasks of nectar and cases of ambrosia, and gave the nectar to Piper, who held her hand out for it, turning quickly to Jason, who was now obscured by Annabetha and Piper.  
Hazel came over and knelt down next to Percy. Uncapping the container of ambrosia, she held out one of the small squares of the godly food and held it to Frank's mouth. Almost numbly, he leant his head forward slightly and took the square of food.

Frank had never tasted the Greek medicine before, and as he chewed on the soft hunk of matter, he almost choked with emotion. It was Frank's favourite, straight from the kitchen, made by his mother- duck salad. He practically inhaled the rest of the ambrosia, savouring the flavour- it wasn't often he got such a crystal clear reminder of his mother.

As he finished, he became aware of how energetic he was feeling- the medicine had restored his strength, leaving him feeling completely refreshed, his body forgetting his bearing of Jason hundreds of feet upwards.

"You feel alright?" Percy asked. "It's a little unsual the first time round, but it's pretty good in a pinch...anyway, just be careful that you don't eat too much," he warned, standing up, "otherwise the stuff'll burn you up. We might be demigods, but that stuff's for full gods."

"Sure as hell beats unicorn shavings." Frank said cheerfully, standing up. Looking at Hazel, his glee at the wonder medicine faded as he saw her injury. "Hazel, you should have some too." He bent down and gave another square of ambrosia to her.

She apprehensively took some, as if expecting it to turn into a storm spirit, or explode violently. "It's fine," Percy reassured her.

Frank watched as she cautiously took a bite, then wolfed down the rest of the square. He was surprised to see, all of a sudden, a tear leaking from her eye. "Hazel! What's wrong?" he asked, concerned.

"I'm alright," she said tearfully. "It just reminds me of home. You know, before."

"I'm sorry, Hazel, i should've said something about how it tastes-" he stepped forward, enclosing his arms around her, into which Hazel sank gratefully.

Jason

Jason's eyes prised themselves open intermittently. A stab of agony in his side was the last thing he remembered, and then abrupt flashes of two people carrying him. A glimpse of a cabin, sheltering him from the elements.

He tried to wake, but he could not. It was as if he was enclosed in a coffin- he could not find the space nor the leverage to push through the obstacle obstructing him from surfacing.

Practically delirious, he flitted back and forth between reality and a hazy, unreal world of his own construction, his fevered mind creating images of a screaming Piper, storm spirits with marble white eyes, laughing at him, an image of Leo, a jester's hat atop his head, laughing hysterically at his plight, lightning flashing upwards to impact against the ceiling of Jupiter's temple, that constantly winked in and out of existence.

And then he heard a voice inside his head.  
_Jason. _a mumbled murmur, like a bee's hum.

_Who's that? What are you doing in my head?_

_Don't you know your own mother?_

_Gaea. Get out of my fucking head._

_Oh, don't worry. i'm just here for a little visit._ she droned, laughing in that half-aware whisper.

Jason suddenly opened his eyes. Percy was the only one standing over him. Piper, Annabeth, Leo, Frank, and Hazel all had their backs to them, talking in hushed tones.

"Well. Good job, buddy." said Percy.

Jason shifted suspiciously. "Are the venti gone?"

"What, the storm spirits? And quit the Latin, please." he said.

"Why? What difference does it make? You're always spouting that Greek shit around me."

"Hey. watch your mouth- all i was doing was just asking if you could give it a rest for a minute, alright?"

"I don't give a shit! Get the-"

The other five turned around, concerned.

"What's going on?" Piper asked slowly.

"Nothing! All i did was ask the twat how he was, and he fucking snapped!" growled Percy.

Jason started to protest his innocence, but Piper put a firm hand on his chest.

"Just rest, Jason."

The hallucination vanished.

_Just rest, Jason. _

_I'm not buying that shit, Gaea._

_Are you sure you want to work with the Greeks? Just you wait until you realise what they have planned for you and your little camp. _

_Oh really? And why would you be sharing this with me?_

_I have very important plans for you, Jason Grace. I have observed your sister for a time, and she would be magnificent at my beck and call, but you... well, you on a leash in the future, not to mention the other events you will be central to, would be vital to myself. I want you alive, so that you can come to me. _

_I don't believe you. _Jason's conviction wavered for a second.

_Hmmm, _Gaea mused.

The presence that had been Gaea withdrew from the back of his mind, and Jason shuddered mentally; he descnded into a blizzard of tortured images once again; Percy thrusting his sword through Hazel's chest, blood spraying as she choked, Annabeth stabbing Piper from behind, stabbing her again and again as she fell to the ground, clutching her wounds in surprise, Leo, setting his hands aflame and holding them to Frank's face, laughing dementedly as Frank screamed; only this time they repeated, Jason watching all three scenes in one space at the same time, unable to tear his vision away from the killings.

Jason sank further down, until he was sinking towards an infinitely black darkness that lay beneath him.

He struggled, thrusting his elbows out to prevent his fall, jamming them against the side of the invisible barriers surrounded by invading darkness, scraping flesh, tensing when he secured a hold with his elbows with all his might. He pushed upwards, he heaved, he threw every ounce of himself at the seal. But it would not budge. He fought, until he could fight no more, being dragged down exponentially. Soon, he was so far from the top he thought he could never resurface.

But then he did, hair ruffled as he zoomed back up to the top, limbs held in tightly, and burst through the container.

He woke to a different world.

Piper

Piper still sat by Jason's bed, faithfully holding his hand. She'd prayed to just about every god she knew, even Ares, although Annabeth had said she'd be better off praying to a leaf, that he would wake well. Even though the nectar had closed up the stab wound in his side, he looked weak, pale, withdrawn. Every now and then he would flinch, and mumble. Piper had tried to lean in closer to hear what he was saying, but every time she did so, his grasp tightened on her hand, anchoring her to the spot.

He'd been in there for nine hours when he finally awoke, and it was far from the reunion, however short the time they had spent apart, she'd hoped for. His eyes snapped open instantly, and she knew something was wrong. The whites of his eyes were devoid of veins, or anything resembling them. The pale blue was still at the centre, but outwards of that? Clear, pure white. His eyes were darting back and forth, searching the room for someone. His hand snatched away from her and his eyes flicked to her, scouring every inch of her. She would have felt embarassed at that kind of scrutiny, save for the fact she was blinking back the tears in her eyes and wiping the ones on her cheek that had been present every second he'd been asleep.

"Piper?" he whispered slowly. Then he leaned forward quicky, grabbed her by the arms. "Where is he?" he whispered feverishly, panicked.

"Jason! What the hell are you doing?" Piper cried. "Where's who?"

"The greeks. Don't trust them- they've got plans, she said, plans plans and we're in danger! A stab in the back!" He laughed brokenly at that last part.

Suddenly he was almost back to normal, apart from the eyes, still bouncing from surface to surface. "Piper, you have to trust me. Don't put all your trust into them, put it in me!" his voice was more composed, more measured. And then it changed again. "Don't trust them. I've seen terrible things, oh yes, more than you know. Something terrible will happen if you don't listen to me. They want to kill me!" he hissed.

Piper leapt away from him. "Jason, what the fuck is going on?" she yelled.

He jumped out of the bed, still pale, but alert. "Who are you shouting for? At? You aren't with them, are you...no, no, no..." laughing, he doubled over, and Piper, tears streaming afresh, stumbled backwards and ran for the door.

Behind her, she heard the scathing sound of metal sliding away from restraints, and the pounding of footsteps- as fast as she could, she sprinted out of the room and up the stairs to the deck.

"Hey!" she heard Leo shout. "What the hell is up with you two?"

She kept on running until she reached the top, bursting out and nearly knocking Annabeth down, who was walking past the entrance to below decks.

"Wow, slow down!" She smiled. "Jason okay then?" She was cut off as the demigod in question charged upstairs and ploughed into her, smashing her to the ground with a crunch.

"Hey!" came another shout from somwhere to Jason's left. She found out who that was when Percy tackled Jason from the side, sending them both rolling. Jason kicked Percy away and scrambled to his feet, holding a pilum. "You!" He screamed manically. "She showed me what you did, what you're going to do!"

Percy uncapped his sword, and the blade expanded to full length. "Jason, what the fuck are you about? I haven't done anything, and i'm not going to-" He was cut off as Jason threw himself at him, snarling like an animal.

Percy

Jason's searpoint whistled past Percy, spinning and coming back around to club him on the back of his head. Percy stumbled, then ducked and slashed at his back, only to find him rolling away. He lunged back at Percy, who dodged and thrust back, then trapped his swordpoint against his leg, pulled Percy towards him, kicking him in the stomach.

What the hell? Percy though incredulously. SInce when did he fight like this?

Jason was fighting without care now, aiming blow after blow, not just with the spearpoint but with the blunt end of the pilum, at Percy, who managed to parry and counter often enough to score one, two, three glancing cuts on Jason's torso. They were only glancing strikes because Percy could never...detach himself from Jason's fury long enough to get a followthrough on the blow- Jason pressed Percy more and more, pushing forward, never even flinching at his injuries, though blood dripped down his chest.

Percy reeled backward, only just managing to keep Jason's spear from reaching him- his blocks came closer to being too late with every impact, until, finally, he was overwhelmed, even as he saw Piper, eyes wide, frozen in place. He tripped over something on the floor, and even as he fell backwards to lie on his back, he realised it had been the prone form of Annabeth, still stunned on the ground.

Jason leapt onto Percy, spear pressing down onto his throat. Percy dropped his sword and placed his hands on the spear, desperately pushing upwards, to no avail. Jason already had a solid grip, and with the added advantage of pressing downwards, working with gravity rather than against it. Percy felt the spear's wooden handle crushing his windpipe, the pressure increasing as Jason's strength and advantages overcame his own. Percy saw shadows clouding the edge of his vision, choking and spluttering.

Even as darkness almost fully set in on him, feeling the blood from Jason's wounds dropping onto his shirt, the pressure eased, and through his brightening vision he saw Jason slump to one side.

Annabeth stood over Jason, knife in hand, hilt still following through from the knockout blow.

"Gods..." Percy croaked. "Thanks."

"So you owe me," she said, pulling him up. "What else is new?"

"What the fuck was wrong with him?" Annabeth said, rubbing her head with a grimace.

"No idea." Percy whispered. He looked past Annabeth to see Piper, still frozen in shock. She didn't move a muscle as Leo came from down below, stopping as he saw Jason's motionless body.

Annabeth turned to follow his gaze. "Oh gods... Piper?" she said cautiously.

"Leo," Percy said quietly, still feeling his raw throat. "Help me get Jason downstairs."

Leo nervously itched around Piper, who was being talked to by Annabeth in low, soothing tones as she approached her to put an arm around her, and bent down to aid percy in lifting Jason up. "Bloody hell, he's a fat bastard," he grumbled as they lugged him towards to door leading to the downstairs areas. "What the hell?" Leo said in surprise as he saw the light slashes across Jason's chest.

"Downstairs."

"Huh?"

"Downstairs!" Percy hissed as loud as he could with his throat predicament.

Jason's legs trailed down the metal steps as they carried him back into the storeroom- the entrace of which was the third of five doors downstairs. This one was at a right angle to the two bedroom doors, which on the far left of the stairs, ten feet away; facing the stairs. They dragged him over, the circular door spinning open.

Dropping Jason none too gently onto the floor, Percy stood, rubbing his throat to look at the storeroom.

There was a forge in the 30 feet square room, at the far end, the magical fire constantly burning. It, the anvil, the other forging equipment and other raw materials were shielded by a circular dome of celestial bronze. Percy had seen the forge last night before sleeping, as well as the stacks of arrows and small amounts of ammunition for the pistols to the right of the forge. There were six fridges in the storage room, each one brimming with food-apparently, they were all securely locked down,as was the food, but Percy had seen enough of Leo to know that that probably wasn't the truth.

"Right. You gonna tell me what the heck was going on or not?" asked Leo.

"He went fucking mental, that's what happened," Percy said, the strength of his voice increasing as his throat recovered. "I saw Piper running out from downstairs, looking terrified, who ran into Annabeth. She was just asking her what was up when Jason comes sprinting out of the door, spear in his hand, and smack her to the ground. So, i got him away from Annabeth right after that. It didn't go too well for me though. Asshole almost choked me to death."

"Yeah, not just that. You seen yourself?" Leo asked, gesturing towards Percy's torso.

Percy looked down, and was almost surprised to see the various bloody slashes in his shirt and the bruises on his arms, for he had felt nothing.

He rested his back on one of the fridges, and slumped down, relaxing his neck to rest his head on the door of the fridge. "Well, i wouldn't be surprised. He was acting like a freaking nut."

"So...Piper's kind of freaking because he was trying to kill you?" Leo said, unsure.

Percy looked at him. "Yeah..."

Leo sighed."Inherited traits," he muttered.

"What?" Percy said quizzically.

"Oh, nothing. What are we gonna do with Jason? Keep him in here?"

"Nah...we'll tie him down in his room. Shut him off from Piper and Annabeth. I'll go in the bed next to him, stay awake, keep and eye on him to see that he doesn't get out."

"Alright." Leo knelt, looking kind of uncomfortable.

"We'll wait down here for a minute. Give Annabeth a bit to talk to Piper, then we'll take him back into his room," said Percy in response to Leo's unasked question. "So," he added after a moment's pause, "You made anything with that forge over there?"

Leo grinned. "No, not yet, actually, but if we ever need more arrows or even plenty more weapons, I'll make them."

"What's it like, being able to just make stuff that quickly? Do you guys just learn really fast, or can you just do it without even thinking?"

"Kind of both," he replied. "We learn all of that quickly, but a fair amount we do without even realising, which is weird but useful. Like one time, I was flying this plane we made over Long Island and I had to keep talking, otherwise i'd start thinking about what i was doing, and be like, I can't be doing this! But recently, i can almost shut off that part of my head that says that. Still, not a patch on what you can do, from what I hear," Leo said.

"Well," Percy said, embarassed, "It's nothing-"

"Can you acually breathe underwater? Can you like, completely control water? Can you, as well, like, pull all the water out of someone's body to kill them?" Leo started gesturing madly with his hands as he warmed up. "Is it also true you can make your own hurricane?"

"Yeah," Percy said, scratching his head.

"That's freakin' badass!"

"Dude," Percy said, trying not to laugh, "keep it down, he'll wake up."

"Yeah. It's kind of weird, sitting next to him while he's bleeding and stuff, keeping guard on him. Also kind of weird that Piper isn't here."

"They're dating, right?" Percy asked.

"Yeah. Beauty Queen and Sparky- well, she calls him that sometimes, but all the same."

"As for, well, the pulling water out of people's bodies, I don't know- that's kind of like, really complex. I don't know if can do that- besides- it isn't usually people we're fighting. Hopefully we won't get any demigods turning over to Gaea, but monsters don't really have any water in them, i wouldn't think. Just bags of blood," he added, laughing.

"So does Annabeth have any idea where we're going yet?" Asked Leo.

Percy hesitated. "She doesn't really have any ideas just yet, but we'll talk, and figure something out. We'll come up with where it is we need to go. By the way, how come you brought up a ton of metals to be put on the Argo? What are they for?"

Leo grinned and tapped the side of his nose. "Need to know, dude. Haha, no- you'll see soon enough; i'm keeping it as a surprise."

Percy smiled and shrugged. " Be interesting to see whatever it is, then. Do you want to go back up and check out how Annabeth's doing with Piper? We shoulder probably figure out where to keep him- I mean, we can't keep him in here; if he's still as crazy as he was before, he'll probably eat all the food and try and get rid of all the ambrosia and nectar in here."

"Yeah, sure- we could strap him down on a bed- there is another room, so he could go in on of those beds," Leo suggested.  
He heaved himself up off his haunches and went out through the door. Percy heard him running up the stairs to the deck even as he moved closer to the door, further from Jason, and laid his sword across his lap, hand on the hilt.

Watching him carefully, Percy wandered about Jason's attack on him. There'd obviously been a reason, and it clearly wasn't the fact that Percy had beaten him their sparring practice. What had been wrong with him? It hadn't even seemed like Jason in the slightest, that crazy whirling of the spear, a weird light in his eyes. Percy had never seen the guy lose his cool or anything like that in the time he'd spent around him, so for that self-control to suddenly break like that was strange. Not least of all for Piper, who was probably still up there being comforted by Annabeth.

He wandered how Jason would react when he knew Annabeth had knocked him out. If he was a messed up as he had been before, he'd probably try and kill her. But Percy wasn't going to let that happen. Oh no. Well, now he knew what he was capable of, and he'd be watching him, just to make sure it didn't happen again.

Leo came back through the door, and walking over to Jason, put his hands under his arms. "Annabeth's still talking to Piper in the other room on the top deck- she said to move him into the spare room while she's still up there."

Grabbing Jason's legs, Percy lifted him up. Backing out of the doorway, towards the spare room, the entrance to which was next to his room. "By the way, dude," Percy said as they lugged him through the door after he kicked it open. "It would have been better if Jason hadn't had a nice window to jump out of, you know?"

"We'll just strap him down nice and tight," Leo said, huffing as they hauled Jason's unconscious form onto the bed.

"I'll get some leather then, so we can get the job done and get some rest." Percy said.


	7. Chapter 7

**Here we are again. Looking forward, very much so, to the Mark of Athena. I really cannot wait to see how Riordan manages the actual mark itself, what has happened to Athena- not too stunned that something has happened- indeed, gods are not really the supreme power, as Percy and a whole lot of other people have shown- so she's probably been captured, sliced to peices- i'm pretty the message 'avenge me' wouldn't come for a simple capturing- more like a little humiliation. But, anyway, here we go- and this is really, really short, so, I am dissapointed myself, but I apologise, and promise to have something at around 10,000 words next update. Review plzkthnxbai**

Annnabeth

Annabeth wandered out from the second cabin on the deck, looking back at the fast spiraling circular doorway that held Piper, Frank, and Hazel. Frank and Hazel had been inside there, playing about with the television- apparently the noise that had made blocked out all the other sounds coming from jason and Percy's tussle, when she had herded Piper in, who had looked increasingly fragile by the minute. Worried about Piper's state of mind almost as much as she did for Jason- even so, she tried to empathise with the situation, imagining Percy attacking- no. That was the most ridiculous thought. It was impossible. _Exactly, _she told herself. That perfect, infalliable Jason would attack Percy like that...well, it had shocked her. Not enough to make her refrain from clubbing him with her knife hilt, mind you. After she stood there a moment, she strode downstairs, looking for Percy and Leo. Who had been no help at all, thankyou very much. She'd spoken to Piper very briefly after comforting her for a while, and the most she'd been able to wriggle out of her was that he'd been acting...well, pretty much insane- too far gone, at least, to doubt that. She had to organise some way of looking after him until she found a way of bringing him back, and she doubted very much that they'd done anything other than sit with him. She strode downstairs, quickly, and, hearing and seeing, just, the door close to the third bedroom, she started in surprise and walked over to there. Could it be they had actually formulated a plan to do something about it? She opened the door, to see Percy and Leo binding an unconscious Jason to the deck with straps and strips of leather, tied and knotted underneath the bed. _Wow._  
Percy turned, and greeted her. She hesitated as he turned, to reply from his greeting. Percy with his shirt off was distracting, she had to admit. But not that much. Percy raised his eyebrows. "Annabeth?"  
She shook herself slightly. "Yeah. Um, you guys are tying him up? Great, so I was thinking we should get two of you down here and staying in here to guard him, you know...until we can figure out how to heal him of whatever's got him like this."

"Yeah, I was thiking about that. Maybe me and Frank should get down here, you know, until we can, as you said, cure him." Agreed Percy.

Leo stood with his arms folded looking at Jason, and then Annabeth. "How soon is that, then?"

_Worried, then._ Annabeth thought. _Only he'd prefer it if we didn't see. _

"well," she replied. "I should probably go back upstairs and send an Iris-message back to camp. Chiron can probably talk with the Apollo cabin. But, about Jason, you and Frank, percy, can you keep him under guard and everything?"

"Yeah, of course." Percy replied.

"Right," Leo said, clapping his hands together in a fair imitation of anticipation. "I'll get Frank to come back downstairs, and then i'll just carry on steering the ship to wherever it is we have to go..." he trailed off as he wandered out of the door.

Annabeth sat herself down on the bed next to Jason's, which Percy was leaning on, though with a very faint air of apprehension about him.

"Are you ok, Percy? That did't look too comfortable when he was strangling you," she asked with the faint hint of a smile.

He looked at her for a moment, expression not changing, then the corners of his mouth twitched. "Yeah, i'm fine. Could barely speak for a moment or two afterwards though," he said. "I've had worse."

"Awww." She got up off the bed, and walked to the front of Percy, tracing the lines on his chest with one hand as the other sanked round his neck and brought him down slightly, as he was not too much taller than her, to kiss him.

A slight shuffling of feet turned her head from Percy's, and she turned to to see Frank standing haltingly in the doorway.  
"Er...Leo said to come downstairs- do you...need me?" He stammered.

Annabeth realised how was still curled around Percy, and wthdrew herself, face flushing, if slightly reluctantly- which he seemed to be, as well. "We were talking about Jason," she said.

"Yeah, right." Frank seemed to recover from his embarassment. "I heard what happened..."

"Basically, we need someone to keep and eye on him. Well, two someones, actually, since everyone's got to sleep, so would you be all right with Percy in here, keeping an eye on him?" she asked.

"Er...yeah, no reason not to," he replied.

"Ok, great," she said, satisfied. "Why doesn't one of you collect your things for a night or two- it may take a few days to get him back to normal-" she hadn't the faintest idea, but she was hoping what Chiron or the Apollo campers told her would be promising. "And i'll go back upstairs and send an Iris-message." She walked out of the doorway in front of Frank, who had come further into the room, and smiled at Percy before walking upstairs, onto the deck.  
She took a quick glance into the other cabin to see Piper talking with Hazel, who had her arm round her, but mostly crying. She walked round to the back of the cabin with the instruments in, and, fishing in one pocket, brought out a golden drachma. WIth the other, she unravelled the hose, and, holding the nozzle out in front of her, created a delicate rainbow with a combination of the fine spray and the late afternoon light shining on the deck.

She threw the drachma into the mist and intoned, "O Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow, accept my offering. Show me Chiron, at Camp Half-Blood."

The drachma simply dissapeared in the rainbow, as if enveloped up by an invisible, gargantuan hand. There was silence, apart from a faint murmmur from the other cabin, and then Chrion appeared, in full horse form, bow hanging at one side in his hand and quiver over his back. He was teaching a class, watching a bunch of kids drill arrows into bullseyes a distance away.

"Chiron!" She called.

He turned, surprise evident on his face as he recognised her. "Annabeth!" he greeted her. "How goes the journey? Is Percy well? and Jason?"

"We're making good progress," she assured him. "And Percy's fine." Her hesitation filled in the words more completely than words could.

Chiron cantered slightly. "What has happened to Jason?" He looked to the side, and appeared to be waving campers away. _For the best_, Annabeth guessed. _Won't really look good if Jason's out of the game a few days into it._

"I don't know. He was injured during an attack on the Argo II- he was out cold, completely out for quite a while, about nine hours, and when he woke- I don't know, it was almost like he was going completely insae- he chased Piper out of the room with a spear, gods! And then he barged me over and almost killed Percy-" her lip trembled slightly, although she barely realised it. "I managed to knock him out, and we're holding him down, with a guard on him. What we need is a way to make him better. I was hoping someone from the Apollo cabin, maybe Will could-"

She said no more before Chiron gestured hurriedly to the side, beckoning, and then Will, form the Apollo cabin, ducked into the image slightly in front of Chiron.

"What's up, Annabeth?"

She explained the situation, as briefly as she could, to him. When she had finished, he sighed in consternation, running a hand through his blond hair.  
"Jesus. There is something you can do, but it's fairly risky."  
"Well, it's for the best, Will. We've got to get him well, soon!"  
"Ok. What you've got to do is feed him ambrosia and nectar, right up to the point where if he takes another drop he'll burn up. Different people have different resistances, so i'm not sure how much he could take. Essentially what this does, is- you know how we're all half-god, half-mortal? This basically pushes our mortal half to its very limit, it almost burns it away, and, in doing so, while the mortal part of the body is practically being incinerated, it's...really weak, you know? And what you need to do then, is to remind him of a personal memory- best coming from the person the memory concerns, but anyone may do- well, you know, just as long as it's not someone he hates- and the memory serves as a lifeline to who they were before, it brings them back to the state beforehand, to their usual state. And that's it. You see the risk? If you feed him the wrong amount, he'll burn up, or, if it's too little, the memory won't work, and you'll have to wait days for him to recover- he may even remember the memory and stop himself from responding to another attempt."

Annabeth caught her breath. It was by no means the riskiest thing she had ever done, or, most likely would ever do, yet anything risky concerning one of the seven can be considered twenty times so. Piper would have to do it- and yet, she needed time to recover. She could hardly just keep up as she had been before.

"All right. It's the best we've got." Annabeth reasoned.

Chiron attempted a smile, though worry prevented the full upturning of his mouth, and tightened his eyes. "I'm sure you'll succeed. Remember to take care of-"

Annabeth just looked at him. And raised an eyebrow.

"Yes," he conceded, smiling in a more lively fashion this time. "I'm sure you'll do that better than anyone else.


	8. Chapter 8

**Hey guys- i did promise something in the region of 10,000 words- I am writing this intro before i finish, but i have confidence- I'm writing everything possible, and i'm updating all of that, so here we are, as an apology for the short 2,000 words from last time, and because I love writing so much. So, many thanks go to Angel daughter of Nike (like the pen name) for the story favourite. Now, one of the most intruiging things about the information we have recived regarding the Mark of Athena, was the message Athena is said to have left Annabeth: **_**follow the mark of athena. Avenge me.**_** Why did she leave the message? What is the purpose of Annabeth's directed vengeance? Has Athena been captured? If so, how? She's the think tank of the gods, and since Enceladus had been defeated, she doesn't even have her giant counterpart to combat her. So how Riordan handles that will be so, so interesting, and it's just incredibly... mysterious Regardless of the fact that my view of what may happen is undoubtedly wrong, i have a crack at tackling that topic now. On one of the days I was writing this, I went to a Waterstones to pick up a copy of The Demigod Diaries, except they didn't have it- I think someone else pilfered it before me- so I was especially annoyed to miss out on something which prolongs the agony until the Mark of Athena. I'm hoping that TDD gives lots of rereading, which would be fantastic during our long wait. Review plzkthnxbai**

Annabeth walked downstairs, chewing her lip. She wasn't sure that the success ratio that Will had spoken of and that she had calculated in her mind was suffiecient to ensure an attempt in the first place- had it been anyone else, she would have gone ahead and said no. But, all things considered, he was one of the seven, and so it had to be done. She brushed open the door to Jason's room and began walking up and down as she explained the predicament to Frank and Percy.

There was a short silence when she had finished. "Well, I know it sounds risky, but we've got to do it, right?" Percy said. "Not to mention the fact it'd be nice to sleep where I was sleeping in the first place, or that it'd be nice to not be attacked by him again- he's one of the seven, you know?"

"Yeah," Frank agreed, nodding his head. "I don't know what was wrong, but we've got to fix him up."

Annabeth nodded, slowly, still pacing, although slowing. "Ok. Well, you know what we have to do, you two, so just keep him under lock and key. Or, well, you know- just keep an eye on him. Don't forget to feed him once he does wake up, though, ok?"

"Yeah, don't worry, we won't forget." Percy assured her.

"Ok-"

"Annabeth," came a muffled call from outside the room.

Annabeth turned and poked her head round the door, and yelled up the stairs: "Leo? What is it?"

"Come up here!" Came the answering shout.  
Grumbling, Annabeth turned again. "Don't forget, you two; food water, for yourselves as well as him."

"We know," Frank said, laughing.

Annabeth just raised an eyebrow at a grinning Percy as she ducked back out of the room and jogged back up the stairs, until she reached the cabin furthest towards the front of the deck, where Leo was hanging his curly head out of the doorway.

When he saw her, he began talking again, ducking inside as he did so. "We've got another storm coming in..." he said.

"What?" Annabeth said, walking inside the cabin. "How long ago did you see this, Leo?"

"'Bout ten seconds ago, I'd guess," he replied as he sat down in a wheeled chair that shifted backwards on those wheels.  
Annabeth raised a skeptical eyebrow.

"For real this time, Annabeth. I was thinking we should take the boat down into the water- the stabilisers could handle it easily, but there isn't any need to put stress on them, even if it is tiny. Also," He added quietly, "Jason's not really fit to be doing anything up here, you know, and Percy's probably able to do something down there to keep any monsters n' stuff away from us."

Annabeth just stared at him. Being sensible? What was this? Maybe he can be sensible-

"I was thinking, you know... maybe we should have a new colour on the ship. Bright green, maybe, with orange stripes. Just a thought."

She shook her head, laughing under her breath. "Take the ship down, Leo."

She walked out, still laughing, to return downstairs, into her room, where, now, only her and Piper remained. She drew across the doors on the balcony, where the chairs and table on that single balcony were sealed to the floor. She felt the ship descending ever so slowly, down towards the ocean surface. She sat herself on the single table and one of the chairs that occupied the four-bed room. She opened Daedalus' laptop, fingers flickering across the keyboard to type in the password she had set after Daedalus himself had gifted her with it. It contained priceless information in the form of inventions, ones that had either been produced or, more usually, ones that weren't to be produced. She now used it for her own work- she had a wireless 'go anywhere' dongle, which, as the signal bar showed, was giving her internet access, although the signal hadn't been present as they'd been higher up- now, as they descended, that bar filled up, and Annabeth did some searching. She'd decided, since she was apparently the one that could lead them to the doors of death, that she obviously had to start at a location with significant historical importance. Nowhere other than the Coliseum would be appropriate, she felt.

She'd felt blood, ever so distantly, draining from her face, as Percy made it clear that she was the one who was supposed to read the signs to lead the seven to where they were supposed to go. Not just because she'd suddenly felt the leaden weight of responsibility on her shoulders, far more so than before, was because she had been reminded of a visit she'd had from a very special person. Not just her mother, but the goddess of war and wisdom, Athena.

To say it'd been a pleasant visit would be a complete and utter lie- the fact that it had been her birthday didn't seem to have saved her from a particularly uncomfortable visit.

_Annabeth opened her eyes, and her hand darted towards the knife she kept underneath her pillow. She had that feeling that something else, something unnatural was in the room with he. She opened her eyes miniscule amount, intending to discover the identity of the intruder, and as she did so, she saw the hem of a dress, and heard a voice, that did not attempt to be quiet, something that she would suspect would be true in an intruder. She opened her eyes wide. _

_"Daughter."_

_"Mother!" Annabeth whispered in disbelief. "Mother, what are you doing here? Has Zeus allowed you to-"_

_"Zeus has not lifted his foolish restrictions," replied the tall, blonde-haired woman standing in front of Annabeth, dressed in jeans and a white blouse. Her eyes contained the wintry, contained grey fury of a tempest, and right now, those eyes were directed, full force, at Annabeth's own. And, judging from her mother's expression, she was not in the best of mods. _

_"I am, however under the impression that the seven demigods of the prophecy are being gathered. Greek, and Roman, to embark on a journey that needs a reader of signs to lead them to their objective. And you, my daughter, are one such demigod that can provide them with a reader."_

_Annabeth listened in silence, even when her mother took a moment to settle herself into a chair inside Cabin nine.  
"As I leave you, Annabeth," she continued, "I will mark you as one of the readers. But I have one more thing to say regarding yourself. Or, more specifically, you and Percy Jackson."_

_Annabeth desperately tried to contain a hiss of fury and a sigh of depsair. Several times since she'd started going out with Percy, her mother had approached, bearing several reasons why her dating him was the least sensible choice possible. On all of those occasions, Annabeth had simply ignored her mother- not because she didn't want to listen to the arguments, which may have contained a valid point, and, knowing Athena, definitely did, but because she knew that even if she did listen, and think on them, nothing could override the fact that she adored Percy. _

_"Daughter, there is one thing a child of Athena can never afford to show- weakness. We may not have the brainless brawn of the offspring of Ares, or the might of Poseidon's children, or the versatility of Hermes' children- we have power and intelligence in large measure, usually the latter in far greater abundance, thankfully. A trained fighter that uses her head can be far more effective than one with knots of muscle for a brain. Weaknesses are gaps in a warrior's armour- one particular weakness that leaves a gaping area of flesh exposed is the care we may give to others. That makes them a target for others, and demigods of all people, with all your frailities and flaws, cannot afford this."_

_"Mother!" Annabeth cried exasperatedly, giving in._

_Athena studied her for a moment, storm-grey eyes probing. "I believe, that, this once, you could do without a talking to from me. So, I shall take my leave, and leave you with a gift of sorts, and a warning- Jackson may cause more trouble than he is worth."_

_Annabeth cried out -as Athena vanished instantaneously, a searing, blinding pain stabbed her thigh, white-hot agony lancing up and down her leg from midway up her thigh- it felt like a day-old knife cut, rubbed in salt and slashed open again, it felt like a skinless body exposed to the touch of burning coals, it felt like her leg had been flayed with steel-tipped whips, skin scraped with iron and flayed again. She screamed, rolling backwards, her knife dropping from her hands to land with a clang against the floor as she clapped both hands to her thigh, where the pain emanated from. And then, after what seemed like hours had to have passed, yet what would actually be only seconds later, as Annabeth knew from past experience of pain, she was released from the cruel poker of pain that had jabbed at her.  
She shook her haid a number of times to clear the residue of that agony from her head, and became aware of some of her cabinmates clustered around her, Malcolm most prominent at the front, his forehead creased in concern. "What happened?"_

_"..." Annabeth hesitated. Had Athena wanted her siblings to know of what had happened here, she would have appeared to them, as well, but she had not, apparently- she was sure the goddess' presence would be enough to rouse the others, undisguised. Athena always had a plan, she reminded herself. "A nightmare," she responded, laying her head back on her pillows, forcing her hands away from her flaming leg. As her siblings drew away, relieved that their head counsellor was all right, she turned over on her bed, determined to convince the others that everything was normal- or as normal as it could be. However, as soon as silence reigned inside the cabin, she turned aside her blankets and lifted her shorts slightly to feel gingerly around her thigh, running a finger around the sensitive area. She could feel no mark, no nothing, though it felt as if something had been branded inches deep into her skin. She turned, again, so that the soft light filtering into the cabin in the dawn illuminated, just, her thigh. There was no visible mark there, either._

Even now, Annabeth still fingered her thigh, remembering the pain her mother had put her through- though for what reason, Annabeth had yet to observe. She was sure when they reached the Coliseum, that her mother's strange gift could, and would, be explained.

Even as the absently touched her leg, she searched the web for the exact location of the Coliseum, in Rome, as well as a few other facts that she distractingly intruiging, such as regarding the architecture, its construction, protection as a site of national importance, etc, all the while detached.

The door opened suddenly, and Annabeth's hand flashed to her knife strap, thinking of a loose Jason. But rather, it was a worried Hazel that entered the room.

"Hi, Annabeth." she said, almost nervously. The two of them had certainly got on well, as far as their limited conversations had allowed. Annabeth found it satisfying that practically of them would get on well as far as it had gone- she'd almost been surprised, to her embarassment, though she hadn't let it show, to find Hazel as agreeable as she was from what she had seen, almost as if she was expecting the surly, disagreeable, ignorant Roman stereotype Jason had portrayed to them, despite knowing Jason was quite far from that, and so was Frank, for that matter; but Hazel was just as nice as Piper.

"What's up?" She asked, letting her hand drop to the side and flicking a glance at the computer before diverting her attention fully to Hazel, who wouldn't have come in here almost cutting her fingers off with her teeth with nervousness for nothing.

"It's just Piper, that's all. I'm not sure what to do exactly. She just kind of sits there, and me and her have talked quite a bit, it's just I find it really weird when she talks about Jason, you know...in _that _way, besides the fact she barely manages to speak. Although she's almost managed a few sentences since it happened. I want to be up there helping her, comforting and helping her get through it and everything, but I did see you go in to send one of those Iris-messages back to Camp Half-blood, so I just wanted to know if there was anything Piper should know, or anything I should do, or need to do..." she cut off, still nibbling her nails like a deranged hamster.

Annabeth almost breathed a sigh of relief, then severed it as she realised she couldn't afford to do that. Just simple worry about what to do, concern for Piper, that was all; no unexpected happenings in the middle of the crisis they were already absorbed with, pretty much.

"Well," she sighed, she could not help it, "if she's talking more since you started comforting her, then that's a definite improvement. The thing is, we know what we have to do to get Jason back to what he usually is, and Piper's involved. Well, without her we can't do it, essentially, so all that has to happen is that she gets better. She's tough. I know she can do it, it's just a matter of how long we have to wait before she well enough to do it. And we don't want her to just be 'well enough'- we want her to be healed, sound in mind as she is in body, fit enough up there so she knows what she's doing. I mean, she'll obviously do it, but it wouldn't be right, just guiding her into doing something _she _doesn't know anything about."

Hazel seemed relieved, grateful even. "Okay. I'll just carry on as usual, then," she smiled.

Annabeth smiled back. "_We_ will."

Momentarily, Hazel tightened the hand that had been relaxing, her knuckles whitening slightly, her eyes tightening.

Annabeth stood instantly. "What is it, Hazel?"

"If can feel something underneath the ship, gold, incredible amounts of it. It was so faint before i hadn't even noticed it, but now we're coming down onto the ocean I guess it's coming closer...what could it be from?"

"Maybe an undersea mining rig, mortal," Annabeth suggested, though she doubted it.

Hazel saw the doubt, maybe in her voice or in her expression, but either way, the two rushed out of the room, up the stairs and were peering over the edge of the craft, wind brushing upwards, sending their hair, blonde and warm brown flying up above them.  
Underneath the ship, all was quiet; even though the air impacting them and the approaching evening slightly lessened the quality of visibility, they could see not a patch of suspiciously dark or light ocean, no huge figures rising from the ocean to battle them, no colossal fins breaking the surface of the ocean. The sea's surface, from what they could see, looked utterly calm.

"I don't think..." Annabeth hesitated, taking a little more time to make sure, "That there's anything down there. If there was, it's been scared off."

The two of them relaxed in almost mirror motions. Annabeth looked to the side at Hazel, hesitating. "I hope you don't mind me asking, Hazel... but it's just Percy said something about you that-"

"It's all right, you can ask. Seeing how much Percy admires you- and that's an understatement- no harm'll come of telling you, I guess. This is a second chance for me, you could say. I died in 1941, but Nico...brought me back- oh, by the way, how did you know Nico?"

Annabeth was slightly shocked- to hear Hazel dismiss her own death out of hand and then move onto another subject so quickly was a surprise, but it wasn't, on the other hand, something you wanted to dwell on. She studied her for a second, and then replied; "We were the ones who first found him and his sister." She saw Hazel's expression change from inquisitiveness to sadness during those last words- sadness for Nico, or self-pity? "You know about his sister, though, don't you?" she finished.

"Yeah." she said quietly.

"After the Titan War... you know what that was, right?" At Hazel's slight, hesitant nod, she carried on. "Not too much, then and I'm not surprised. The gods didn't want us coming into contact, and they do the whole 'no-contact' thing pretty well," she laughed, and Hazel laughed in kind. "He drifted off a little bit. He spent way, way more time at camp than he had done before, especially seeing as he had his own cabin after the war, but he always had regular trips away, and we wouldn't see him for a while at a time."

"Yeah, that's Nico. He never really stays around some people for longer than he can help it. He knows he makes people uneasy, and he doesn't mind- that much, anyway- any more." Hazel said.

"I feel bad for him, in a way," Annabeth said. "It's not his fault that Hades or Pluto got the short straw when the big three were choosing which part of this realm they got, you know?"

Hazel laughed, looking sideways at Annabeth. "Frank says the same thing, actually."

"Really? Frank seems like a nice guy. How long have you two been an item?" Annabeth asked.

Hazel flushed, which meant she must have been blushing furiously for Annabeth to make out in the almost-complete darkness of the late evening. "Not very long, only a few days to be honest. We were on the quest with Percy, and well...just at the end of that, basically since we came back to Camp Jupiter."

Strange, Annabeth thought, that Hazel was so embarassed and cautious when it came to talk of her boyfriend, yet utterly uncaring when discussing her second life, and her first death.

"So what about you and Percy?" she asked.

Annabeht looked down at the sea surface again, coming up to meet them. "Well, I've always liked him, to be honest, but he was so...dense- he still is, a lot of the time, he never seemed capable of thinking like that, and, well, there were...complications." Annabeth didn't want to share anything about Luke- it didn't feel right. On the other hand, she felt comfortable talking to Hazel about Percy- not completely, but fairly comfortable. Plus, this was a girl's topic, really, and she wanted to understand Hazel, and eventually be friends with her. "We've been together really for months. And then, of course, because of the whole fucking 'forced exchange' thing I didn't see him for eight months." Annabeth forced down the anger she felt inside, at the 'exchange,' at Hera, and reminded herself not to twitch for her knife.

Hazel seemed to read the motion Annabeth must have hand in her hand, though, and eyed her knife, strapped to her arm. "How come you always fight with a knife?" Hazel asked. "I mean, I'm not one to talk about unusual choices, seeing as I fight with a spatha..."

Annabeth hesitated. "A friend gave it to me, a while ago. He isn't really around any more, so I keep it as a reminder." _Of what Percy did for me,_ she added in her head.

Hazel

As Hazel said another goodbye to Annabeth and a supported Piper, who walked into their room, she decided that she really liked Annabeth. She seemed pretty easygoing, and had a sense of humour to boot, and was decidedly friendly and open. _well, _she reasoned, _you were too, so she didn't really have any choice._ She opened the door to her room, and walked in. She went past her bed, sweeping the set of clothes she was wearing- loose shorts and a shirt. As she pulled off the clothes she had been wearing the whole day, she checked the time- nine o'clock, now. Earlier than she might usually go to sleep, but she was tired enough. All the fuss- necessary fuss, she supposed- about Jason and Piper and then the fight with the storm spirits had been tiring- her godly powers had been no use at all during the fight, so she'd had to rely simply on her spatha and her sword skills to keep her alive. Frank had given her a helping paw whenever he could, yet he had been occupied a fair amount of the time. She'd come away for the most part unscathed, but a nibble on some of the godly food the Greeks had stored on the ship had washed those away. _Stop thinking of them that way, _she chided herself. _You know all their names, Hazel. Annabeth, Percy, Piper, Le-_ she stopped as she came out of the bathroom, as Leo came in, looking especially tired.

He looked up and saw her, as he walked towards his bed, feet dragging. "Where's Frank?" he paused as he looked up at her, and he saw that he'd answered his own question in his head. Frank was, for this night and the next, maybe even the next, depending on Piper's condition, sleeping in another room with Percy and a restrained Jason.  
Although she felt slightly awkward at spending the night in the same room as him, even though they were a bed apart, she was quite tired, tired enough that she managed to walk to her bed and climb into her blankets after a small twitch of her lips at Leo, who was looking like he was trying to swallow his tongue, not really a smile, but at least she gave the semblance of keeping her head. If anything, he seemed to get a little more nervous, looking around like he was trying to figure out how to get out of the room.

Hazel decided to deal with it as best she could, and, ignoring the flush of embarassment on her cheeks, she turned over, facing away from him, and closed her eyes. She almost thought she could hear him exhaling heavily.

She kept her eyes closed, and although she knew Leo was a litte over a metre away, and no-one else in the room with them, sleep was too attractive a prospect for her body to resist.

She opened her eyes a while later, a few hours, she thought, to the quiet sound of scratching behind her, like the sound of a pencil on a peice of paper. She turned her shoulders, enough to look over her left-hand one and see Leo, small lamp illuminating the desk he sat in front of, sitting in a chair and sketching something out on a pad of plain paper.

Although she'd thought she was exhausted, Hazel didn't have any trouble rousing herself from her slumber properly.

"Leo?" He turned quickly at his name, and relaxed, slightly when he saw she was awake. "How come you're still up?"

He shrugged. "Can't sleep. I guess i'm just too ADHD for that."

Hazel smiled. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Drawing something."

"Well...not drawing, sketching out a design for something i'm working on." He replied, still not turning back to his work.

Hazel got out of bed and walked over to where he was. As she did, he turned back to his pad of paper and continued to scratch away at it studiously. She took the chair next to him, and, resting an elbow on the table and resting the other hand on her legs, which she had out to the side of the table, pointing towards him. He shifted slightly, glancing at her but continuing to to flick the pencil across the paper.

Looking at what it was he was working away at, Hazel saw a diagram for something that looked like like a metal bracer, drawn over a sketched human hand, save for the wiring drawn into the side of the two-dimensional diagram facing them, and the arrows and labelling, forumlas to do with mechanics, electricity and the like- anything and everything Hazel couldn't get her head around. In the middle of the table was a second sheet of paper, held down by a glass paperweight she hadn't noticed before, that also held a similar sketch- except this one was a gauntlet, also 2D, with the side hollow and showing levers and hoops for fingers, she assumed.  
"What are you working on?" She asked, puzzled and curious.

"Er... well, it's kind of like this set of armour i'm constructing... I haven't really told anyone else, and I know Annabeth will go nuts if she thinks I'm wasting time-"

"No, no, I won't say anything," Hazel said. Leo had a guilty grin on his face, which reminded her of someone.

"It's powered by these fuel cells that you fill with bacteria, and then the energy from the reactions they produce," he said, still writing next to the bracer, "is fed into an accelerator- it magnifies the energy, kind of like a step-up transformer, but..." he trailed off as he looked up at her. She had her eyebrows raised in a 'what the hell' expression, which was how she felt- she didn't have any idea what he was going on about.

"Yeah. Sorry, I just get carried away, I guess." He grinned, suddenly keen. "You want to come and see it? I still need to make the arms, but you can see what i've done so far."

"Oh!...yeah, ok. That'd be nice," Hazel replied, surprised at the change in tone.

"I just...need...to...ok, let's...go," he said, finishing his scribbling on the peice of paper, pulling the diagram for the gauntlet out from underneath the paperweight, folding them both, and standing up. Hazel stood, as well, and followed him out into the area which had the controls for the ship to her right, and the other two rooms across from her and to a forty-five degree angle. Leo headed for the storeroom, though, on their left, the circular spiralling open for him and her, and headed for the forge, the transparent bubble-shaped container around it withdrawing smoothly into the floor.

"I'm just going to make the arm plates first," he said, tucking the peices of paper away inside his jacket, which he took off and threw on the floor with a casual disregard.

"Yeah, that's fine," Hazel said, sitting herself down on a chair, that spun around as she sat in it. She grasped the arms for balance, not expecting the spinning.

"Yeah...sorry. I made a lot of the chairs spinning ones," said Leo with a grin. "I think it was pretty good decision. I'd hate it if I just had to sit still the whole time- I mean how boring is that, right?"

Hazel spun around in the chair a few times. "Yeah, this is better," she agreed.

Leo took a flat sheet of celestial bronze out of a chest far behind him, pressed against the walls. He inserted it into the coals with a pair of tongs, and held it there, after a while taking it out, placing it against the anvil, and beginning to pound it with a hammer he held. Hazel frowned. He hadn't held that hammer a moment ago, and he hadn't reached for one anywhere else in the room as far as she was aware. Where had he got it from? Sammy had never been huge, and Leo was the same; wiry, slim, so she wouldn't have expected him to be any good at forging- but that plainly wasn't true, as she watched. He expertly hammered the plate of metal into an almost tubular shape, narrowing slightly at the end- the forearm. Hazel watched Leo in admiration as he beat the first of two mirrored plates that would encircle a forearm perfectly- his. As he finished beating out the first one, he looked around for the tongs he had used to put the bronze into the coals in the first place, but couldn't find them. Frowning, he rummaged around inside a tool belt, and after a moment or two pulled out, vertically, another pair of tongs. Hazel frowned again. The tool belt shouldn't have had any space inside for that- but he'd pulled it out all the same. Was it magical? She'd never heard of a magic tool belt that either made items smaller or just gave you something you wanted; then again, she'd never been into that kind of thing. If she had wanted something, she would have had Arion, who had run off, leaving smoke and a host of admiring demigods and legacies behind, after the battle in the Fields of Mars. Then a thought occured to her.

"Do you want me to do..." Hazel hesitated. She had no idea what he intended to do with it, apart form the obvious fact that he was going to lift it somewhere.

Leo stopped, surprised. "Oh. Yeah, you can do stuff with jewllery and precious metals, can't you? Well, um...sure, ok. Can you put it in the water?" he gestured to a medium-sized vat of water close to the coals.

"Yeah, no problem," Hazel said. She tucked her feet up underneath her as she focused onto the sheet of bronze. She'd found it a lot easier to control precious things since her quest with Percy and Frank. She hefted it slightly, testing the weight, then shifted it through the air towards the water, past Leo, whose eyes widened as it did so, and finally plunged it into the water, where it released a loud hiss of water.  
"That's so cool," Leo said, still watching the peice of metal bubbling the water furoiusly. "How do you do it? Do you just like, think, go over there, and then it goes? But what if you think the wrong thing, or maybe think about other ways to do it, or if you're, like, really mad at someone, you think, go hit him on the head, then what happens?"

Hazel found herself laughing, putting a hand over her mouth to stop herself from doing so too loudly. She didn't want to wake anybody.

Leo carried on laughing, though, and turned away from the forge. "You mind taking that out now, Hazel?" he asked.

She complied, lifting the metal from the forge and placing it on the anvil again. She got up this time after moving the bronze there, and went over to the anvil, touching the metal. It was warm, but relatively cool to to the touch. She traced the shape, and placed it on her own forearm. She was surprised at how much it weighed, the thinness of the sheet stating the contrary to what she felt. She turned to ask Leo a question.

"How are you going to be able to lift-"

She stopped after pulling her eyes away from the metal as she swivelled, because Leo had turned as well, bringing them very close together, his head, and his lips centimetres from her. Hazel thought she should probably back away, especially given that... Hazel inched her head forward by the smallest amount possible, at almost the same time that Leo did. His eyes met hers for a second. They both inched forward again, moving closer and closer, to the point where Hazel closed her eyes, and she had the sense he had as well. Then something stopped her, forcing her to pause, and she could feel his every slight intake of breath; she could almost feel his lips. Her eyes opened, and looked into his. He blinked and shut his mouth, and she fell utterly still, also closing her mouth.

"Yeah." she said, angling her head backwards, inaling heavily.

"Uhu," he agreed, walking around her.

She went back to the chair, tucking her feet underneath her again, looking at the ceiling, the forge, the fridges, the weapons, metals, anything but Leo.  
He coughed, and suddenly she was looking at him, inspecting him like she was looking for some information about him she could file and tuck away for consideration at a later time. She wasn't doing that, though. "All i've got to do with the arms is to pattern the bracers, then attach them. After that, well, it should be working. You won't say anything to Annabeth, will you?" he added, almost anxiously. "I want to annoy her as much as possible, showing it to her when it's working. Well, it's working now, but it looks kinda retarded with no forearms."

"Ok, go ahead," Hazel said, smiling again, though not as much as she had before. She didn't want to encourage him.

He went to his jacket on the floor again, and withdrew something from one of the inside pockets. A keypad, shaped like a calculator, with, from what she could make out, the numbers 0-9 on it, and a glowing square light placed at the top, above the keys, that was currently red.

He typed in a long sequence of numbers, long fingers flashing rapidly across the keyboard, too fast for her to see. The light at the top of the small pad, no bigger than her hand, flashed green, and stayed green.

Hazel caught a movement from the corner of her eye, and gasped. The far wall, the furthest point in the room from the door, on her right, had just extended backwards, what she had believed to be the wall simply vanishing, the actual wall appearing two, three metres back, with a huge mechanical set of armour taking up that seperating space.

"It's just a hologram, that's all...set up some lights, really focused. The pad just turns them off. You can walk through, if you know it's there. You do, so you can, but just make sure you don't let anything slip. And, if Annabeth, or Percy, or...Frank... or Piper want come down here- especially Piper and Annabeth, try and distract them." he said, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards.

Hazel said nothing, just stared at it.

It was easily seven, seven and a half feet tall. The chest represented a typical breastplate for a Greek, Hazel supposed, muscles imposed on the armour, a circular emblem embossed on the upper chest, a circle with a hammer, bronze flames dancing without motion around it. It was completely sealed, so Hazel didn't see how you were supposed to get into it. The head was ever so slightly smaller in comparison to the chest, a Greek helmet, metal plumes arching above it, with the eyes black holes and the entire face covered with a metalworked representation of a face, laughing hysterically. She looked at Leo when she saw that, raising an eyebrow, and he laughed gleefully. The shoulders were covered with the shoulder flaps of the breastplate, and the arms weren't humanlike, in the loosest possible sense of the word, angular, only curved slightly, clearly flexible with a ball joint at the elbow, with restraints at the side to stop the arm from sliding at an impossible angle for a human. Hazel was clever enough that that much was obvious. The legs were the same, except that the lower legs were covered with Greek graves- once again, she assumed- and the feet were again angled, almost pointed, yet having several overlapping layers on the top, reminding her of a bug's carapace. The forearms didn't contain any armour, instead having a farily weak-looking few bars of bronze to mantain a structure. the hands were complete, having the angular aesthetic again.

"I've watched Iron Man so many times, I just had to try it," Leo said, staring at the set of armour, seeming as enthralled as her. "I'm going to give it a name. Him or her?"

"Her, definitely." Hazel said.

He barked a short laugh out. "All right then, i'll think on something to give her. She's going to be talking to me half the time, or more, while i'm in there, so it needs to be something good. Something that I won't get hacked off saying all the time. Something...sexy but classy. I know! Shaniqua! No, no. I tell you what, I'll think it over." He mused.

Hazel pressed her lips together tightly to keep from bursting out laughing.

"But enough of that." He yawned. "What do you think, then?"

"I think it's amazing, honestly. How long has it taken you?" Hazel shook her head.

"Only a couple of weeks. I got tons of equipment from camp- my cabin gave me all the celestial bronze I needed for it, and the wiring. I also managed to get some Imperial gold from some Vulcan dudes in exchange for celestial bronze, so i'm using it for the weapons."

"Only a couple of weeks!" Hazel said in disbelief. Well, he was a son of Vulcan. Or Hephaestus.

"Yeah." He typed the code into the pad, again too quickly for her to see, and the wall reappeared a few metres in front of where it actually was. Now Hazel actually knew it was just a matter of light, she could make out where the fake wall joined the real- no gaps, it was just a different tone of the wall- or maybe she was imagining it.

"I guess i'm just that good, huh?" He gave a crazy smile.

She smiled.

Annabeth

Annabeth blinked her eyes a few times, clearing her vision. She sat up slowly, throwing her legs out of the side of the bed. Elbows on knees, she rubbed her eyes a few times, then stood up and went over to Piper's bed. She bent down slightly and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. Piper straightaway turned over and looked at Annabeth, eyes a little red.

Annabeth sat down on the side of the bed, leaving her hand on Piper's shoulder. "Are you feeling a bit better today?" she asked.

"Yeah." Piper said, sitting up on the bed. "I'm sorry I barely said anything yesterday. I couldn't help it, but I didn't know what to do-"

"Piper." Annabeth interrupted. "It's fine. I'm so sorry about the whole thing."  
Annabeth wanted to get Jason back up to full health as soon as possible, yet not rushing Piper was important, not just because she actually cared about her as a friend, but also because they didn't want to have Jason well again and one of the seven emotionally cracked like an egg. So, she decided not to tell her until she was sure that Piper was fully capable- or at least as fully capable as could be.

"Is there anything I can get you?" She asked. "I'm going up to have breakfast now."

Piper shook her head. "No thanks, Annabeth. I'll just have it up there, on my own. I just need a little breathing space."

"That's fine." Annabeth got up from the bed.

She walked up the stairs to the deck, not bothering to get changed out of what she slept in just yet. She always woke early, and she doubted anyone else had the strength to get up this early. Well, Piper was a different matter.

She walked in through the circular door, the refreshing breeze on her legs and arms fading as the door spun closed behind her. She liked this second cabin, with its relaxing atmosphere. The Argo II had enough stablisers to keep in steady in flight under any kind of weather, and that included while they were on the sea, which they had been since last night. There wasn't any chance, really, unless some kind of leviathan slammed into the side of the ship, which shouldn't be dismissed, that anything would come free, but just to be sure, the two tables and four chairs around each of them had seals, suction seals that could be activated, holding them down to the floor, rock solid, to prevent them moving for anything short of someone cutting the chair legs in half, at the flick of a switch. The fridge was built into the floor, and had adjusting shelves inside that had never needed to be used, yet. The room was surrounded at waist height almost to the ceiling by window panes. Each one, about three quarters of a metre wide, had a button underneath it, that could make the window slide down into the floor, or raise it up again. The windows could also be made watertight with a press of a button. There were a few window panes that had been removed or had never been built in; instead a thick plastic pane was in place. Two cupboards, each with two hinged doors, held food, on the left-hand side of the door, sat next to the fridge, with a sink and taps underneath them. In the far left corner, the beanbags were nestled, facing the 40-inch plasma screen fastened into the third carbon fibre pane. The tables and chairs sat in the centre, the right and the far right.

Annabeth walked over to the cupboards. From the left-hand one she pulled a bowl. From the other, she pulled a box of cereal, and from the fridge a carton of milk. it wasn't really a patch on the magical feasts they had back at Camp Half-Blood, yet Annabeth enjoyed, for some reason, having the cereal.

She sat down, after pouring herself her breakfast, and turned the tv on with the remote, sitting at the table. Watching the National Geographic channel, she was reminded of the Lotus Hotel and Casino.  
_All those channels, and you turn on the National Geographic?_  
She munched away for a minute or two, still watching, when Percy himself walked in through the circular door.

He looked surprised when he came in. "You're up early." he said.

"I'm usually up early," she replied, dryly.

He eyed her for a moment, then came towards her, smiling a little. She held back a smile, and instead, covering her mouth as she spoke, still eating as she was. "I'm still eating. Unless you want to share my breakfast, you can wait."

He stopped, the, and the smile grew. He went straight past her then, smiling and shaking his head, to the cupboard. "I couldn't sleep much, knowing Frank was up watching, so I decided to get breakfast sooner so that I can take over from him quicker. The guy didn't get enough sleep last night; it's probably best that he catches up. He sat down beside her, with another bowl. She carried on watching the TV as she heard him pouring out milk into the filled bowl.

"National Geographic? Again, with this?" she heard him ask.

"It's interesting, Percy," she insisted. She finished the last mouthful of cereal, and got up, placing her bowl into the sink. She proceeded to wash up her plate immediately- there wasn't any need to let the plates fester, and someone had to do it eventually. It was a good thing there was a general sense of goodwill among the seven, otherwise there might have been several arguments over washing up, and a large pile of that to boot.

Finishing and drying her hands, she walked over to the table, and sat down, just as Percy got up to wash his up as well. Her eyes flicked back to the TV, and she continued to watch, enthralled by the information on screen regarding a supervolcano. Then she heard Percy sit himself down, and turned her eyes from the screen to look at him.

She got up from the chair, and sat herself down in Percy's lap, facing him, legs behind the chair back. She folded her arms and rested her chin on his chest. He smiled down at her, and ran a hand along her leg, starting almost at her ankle and moving up, not too soft, not too hard, all the way to halfway up here thigh, where her shorts began. She inhaled after that, a little more heavily than usual. She brought her head up, and he his down, and their kiss ended her attempts at rational thought. She brought her arms round behind his head, pulling his lips into hers even more. She still felt his hands feeling her legs, running up and down her thighs, then up the outside of her shorts, past her thighs, and up the back of her shirt. His hands felt her back, slipping up the curve, and touching her bra strap. Annabeth was so absorbed in the kissing that she didn't notice that until her bra had been undone and his hands were sliding away from it.

Pulling herself away with a huge effort, inhaling very heavily, she placed her hands on his, with her shirt inbetween her hands and his. "Percy," she said. "Not here. Someone could just walk in!"

He smiled again and planted a small kiss on her lips. "Sorry...carried away, you know."

He never pressed her for anything, either. Always considerate. She reached behind her back, and with sense of reluctance only beaten, and barely at that, by wariness, did up her bra again.

It seemed like that may have been the best decision, as Piper walked through the door a few seconds later. Her head was down, which gave Annabeth the time to pull her hands out from the back of her shirt and swing her other, mostly exposed leg to the other side, to adopt a more casual pose.

Piper looked up and barely batted an eyelid to see Annabeth sitting on Percy's lap. Instead, she walked over to the cupboards to get some breakfast, Annabeth saw. She leaned into Percy's ear, and said, "Come downstairs into our room, quickly- there won't be anyone else there."

He gave her a small smile that threatened to break into a grin, and nodded.

Annabeth looked at Piper, though, just to check that everything physically was all right. She dragged her feet a bit, and seemed rather lacklustre in her motions, but lack of sleep was to be expected from someone in her position.

She hurried herself downstairs, walking quicky to her room. She planted herself on her bed, sitting down and pushing her hair behind her ear with her hand. She crossed her legs on her bed and waited for Percy to come through the door, trying not to let herself get too excited before he'd even entered the room- and then he did, and she practically cleared the distance between her with a single step. She pressed him back against the door with her eagerness, breath leaving him as she staggered him, almost. "Piper won't be too long," she murmmured into his ear as he kissed her neck, then her collarbone area.

"That's ok," he said back, quietly but excited as well.

They went on the bed this time, him underneath her. This time, she didn't prevent him from taking off her bra, and feeling her breasts underneath her shirt. They kissed all the while, mouths connected, until she said that she thought she had heard something, a couple of minutes later.

Truth be told, she had been getting more and more into it as they had kept at it in those minutes, and she thought she may end up doing something more serious, which she would have preferred to do when she was completely alone with Percy, so that she could do it properly and enjoy it to the fullest extent possible. He was probably feeling the same way right now, and if he didn't, he wouldn't make the slightest complaint. He was more than happy to take whatever he had, no matter for how long.

She got up off the bed, lifting her shirt up above her chest, so that he could put her bra on again for her- it wasn't that she couldn't do it, or that she was inept at putting one on, it was just that Percy putting it on made it...sexier. She couldn't think of another way to describe it, but it was true, it was sexier, especially when his hands brushed... she almost blushed, but she stamped it out. Barely. She knew he enjoyed it, as well.

They had both walked out of the door of their room, Percy behind her, when she heard a noise. he'd heard it, too, because when she looked back to ask if he'd heard it, he held himself in a lowered position, Anaklusmos in his hands. It had been a small clang, like something small dropping onto a peice of metal. it had, seemingly, come from the storeroom.

Annabeth stalked over to the stooreroom as silently as possible, then pausing on the right side of the door, until Percy came, as silently as she had done, and stopped on the left-hand side of the door.

Annabeth put her ear to the door, pressing it tightly against the metal. She could hear something inside, and it wasn't the hissing of the coals from the forge, it wasn't the fridge shifting as they went over some rough waves- it sounded like there were people talking inside.

Annabeth relaxed. "It's just someone in there, it's probably Leo mucking around with the forge," she said, straightening up.

Percy relaxed as well, putting a hand to the metal door; a square door, almost normal, this one was, compared to the revolving circles of the rest of the ship, and pushed it open. He stuck his head round the side, and almost immediately withdrew it again

He looked at her, pulling the door closed with a quiet click. "That isn't Leo. Hell, it isn't anyone we know. All I could see was three guys in there, with all the lights out. I couldn't make out what they were doing, but they were definitely doing something in there."

"What?" Annabeth hissed, dropping into a lower stance again, this time unsheating her knife from its place on her arm.

"Yeah," Percy whispered back, also dropping to a lower position again. "I could just see two of them right at the back of the room, and then the third one was searching something on the floor from what I could make out."

"What do you mean, there are three guys in there? Where the fuck did they come from?" she said.

"I was thinking along the same lines," he replied quietly, "but that's what I saw. I don't know how they got on the ship, but they're in there all right, three of them."

"All right," whispered Annabeth, trying to keep her cool. "Shit." She didn't see how these three guys could just appear in the middle of the Argo II short of jetpacking up to the ship and climbing on board- on the other hand, they were on the water, which made it more believable that they had jumped on board. More to the point, who were they? They couldn't be mortals, unless they believed that they were hijacking a cruise ship or the like, the Mist saw to that. They could have also been hidden aboard the whole time, since...since when? And why on earth would anyone want to be sneaking around? It could be some idiots from Camp Jupiter, or even Camp Half-blood who'd been utterly desperate to come along, but Annabeth didn't think that was the case for a second.

"Okay," she whispered eventually. "Just stay here, and make sure that they don't go anywhere! Got it? I'm going to go and get Leo and Hazel up, and then we can deal with these guys."

He nodded, and hefted Riptide, the bronze casting a faint glow on the metal door.

Annabeth crept away, and walked into the other room, the one with just Hazel and Leo in. Annabeth thought of just the two of them in the room together, and had to clamp a hand over her mouth at the thought of Leo.

Leo and Hazel were fast asleep, the former spawled ungaily over his bed at an almost 45 degree angle, mouth open and hair a complete mess, his jacket was on the floor, but otherwise it appeared he had slept clothed, which, in the circumstances, was probably better. The latter was almost delicately curled up inside her blankets, facing away.

On tip toes, she went over to Leo and shook his shoulder. Twice, and then a third time. The fourth was enough to flutter an eyelid, before Annabeth had enough, and pinched his neck. HIs eyes snapped open, and she clamped a hand over his mouth to prevent the yell from being loosed. HIs hands snapped up to her single one, trying to pry it from his mouth.

"You have to shut up, Leo!" she hissed. "There's other people on board, in the storeroom."

His eyes widened at that, and he tried to speak through her hand. "mmmm mmm mmmm mmmmmm!"

"I've got no idea who they are, so that's why we need you. Percy's already waiting, so if you could get your fat ass out of that bed and come and help us, that'd be great." She whispered.

"mmm...mmmmm mmm mmmm!"

"You'd better be quiet, understand?" She whispered threateningly.

"mm mmm, mmmmm! mmm mmm mmmm mmm."

She took her hand from his mouth and gave him a warning glare, even as she turned and began creeping back towards the door, and towards the storeroom.

"Like a church mouse," came the whisper from behind. "You haven't got shit on this sneaking, check it out."

She would have punched him, except that now perhaps wasn't the best of times. The door spun open, and Percy was still keeping guard, in a weird way, outside the storeroom.

"What about Hazel?" he whispered.

"She's asleep, and she's not even dressed. He was," she gestured at Leo, "and us three are more than capable."

He nodded after a second.

Leo positioned himself directly in front of the door, and then mouthed, "On three."

Annabeth counted it off on her fingers, and on three, Percy shouldered the door open, Leo right behind him, almost eager for some reason, and Annabeth behind him.

The three figures were illuminated by the burst of morning light that flooded into the black room, utterly startled, and possibly a bit blinded. Percy had been right- two of them were right at the back, jumping away from what looked like a huge suit of armour- what the hell was that? And the other one had stood from a chest that he'd obviously been rummaging through.

Her ruminations on the why, what and how of these figures was ended as the three of them leaped at her- Leo, for some reason, ignited one of them straightaway, a stream of fire choking that figure to his knees with a gargled scream even as the flames stripped away the black clothing they wore, sending smoke up into the air.

_The idiot! _Annabeth thought furiously. _We abviously need one of them to talk to, and we can use the other one to check if they're lying to us!_

She slid past Leo, into the room entirely, to see Percy duck underneath a swipe, then come round and whack that same intruder on the back of his head with the flat of his blade, sending that one crashing to the ground. Annabeth immediately ran to that first one, and turned him over from his face-down position. His eyes were open, but glazed over, and Annabeth nodded in satisfaction, turning in time to see Percy and Leo throw the second's head into one of the chests lining the side of the storeroom. He collapsed without a sound to the floor.

Percy and Leo fistbumped. "Nice," they echoed.


	9. It's here, guys

So, it's finally here! So excited about it, went out after school and bought it straightaway. Got right into from the start, thought It was everything I could have expected. Their reunion went down as expected, but in a way only the main man Riordan could have pulled it off. The story was fascinating, The Mark of Athena deal was really original, utterly brilliant with the spiders (got a thing about them myself), the Jason-Percy thing went down as I expected- not a fight between them, but with something else forcing them to do so. Classic humour all the way through, Percy and Annabeth make a brilliant couple, and the ending... such a cliffhanger have I never been witness to. Still trying to get my head around the shock that ending caused. It's brilliant guys, you've got o get out there and read that! Read it through the night, took me about 5 hours, loved every second.

Obvious to say, then, that i'm looking to forward to the next instalement, and the Fanfictions. We don't have a lot to go on for the next book, but time will pass.

Mark of Athena FTW


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